


Exile All the Longer

by Darsynia



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Character Study, Endgame Feels, F/M, Humor, If It Still Counts As A Fix-It When I Rip Your Heart Out In The Process, Infinity War Feels, It Feels Like Slow Burn But It's More Like A Constant Rolling Boil, Leigh's Hair Is Kind of a Character in This, Locked In A Room trope, Possessive Tony, Rated Explicit For Language Yes But Also Sex, Romance, Set During the Five Years in Endgame, Sort of a fix-it, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Tony Falls Really Hard Really Fast, Tony lives, Tony's Haunted By Losing To Thanos, a lot of sweetness, seriously a lot of ANGST
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:42:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 39,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29812755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darsynia/pseuds/Darsynia
Summary: Tony lost Pepper in the Snap. What he gains, what EARTH gains, is a 'gift' from Thanos: Soulmates. Some say that the mad Titan used the stones to do this out of respect for Earth's role in his grand design, others say it's to make those left behind complacent, docile-- even grateful.Tony isn't grateful. He's pissed. His Words are a cruel slap in the face, and the whole concept is bullshit. He spends a year doing right by the world with his company and then settles down to build his lake house. Tony falls for his smart, gorgeous architect as easy as breathing, all the while feeling self-righteous about the whole 'inevitability' of Soulmates. He's beat the system, fallen in love the old-fashioned way. All Tony has to do is get her to actually speak to him, instead of by text or email.And then she does. She says his Words.{Soulmate AU set during the missing 5 years in Endgame. Tony's soulmate helps him heal and reconnect with his team before their relationship is tested by the chance to bring everyone back}
Relationships: Tony Stark/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 71
Kudos: 65





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by my favorite trope in all of fanfiction: Soulmate-identifying marks. In this story they're fairly straightforward, the first words your soulmate says to you are written in their handwriting on your skin somewhere on your body. They don't react in any way, no supernatural elements, just Words.
> 
> I'll be honest, this fic hurts so good. Both Tony and Leigh are hurting, in their own ways, and their journey is bittersweet and glorious. I've never been more in love with an original character I've written than with Leigh Balci, I WANT her style. But this is no typical happy ever after, not when the chance to bring everyone back is eventually presented.
> 
> I started this fic with two goals in mind: write a soulmate AU, and save Tony Stark at the end of Endgame. This is the convoluted, sexy, beautiful, painful, cathartic result. It includes, in my opinion, some of my best writing, including the first few paragraphs.

### Part I: The Gift

### Chapter One

_Seeking to forget makes exile all the longer; the secret of redemption lies in remembrance._

_-Richard von Weizsaecker_

Tony had already expected that the words he spoke into his helmet would be the last he’d speak to Pepper Potts.

Still, when he walks off of the ship, broken, gaunt, and barely alive, it’s with an expectation. Tony thinks that for all his hard work, for throwing his whole self at the problem of stopping Thanos, after losing Peter and most of the people he’d fought with, he’s _earned_ coming home to Pepper.

But she’s gone.

Tony’s knees give way underneath him like they are made of the dust of her.

***

They rejuvenate him with an IV, but to Tony it’s full of bitterness, and he welcomes that as much as the nourishment. He sits, full to the brim with it, as Nat tells him Thanos achieved exactly what he set out to do. He stands, choking on it, as he throws everything he’s got left at Steve, even his ARC reactor. Rhodey tries to help, but Tony’s been practicing fighting with every ounce of energy he has, so he does just that.

***

He wakes up in a hospital bed and looks around for the IV. Maybe he can convince them to shoot him up with something that will let him sleep through about a week’s worth of self-recrimination. Tony does it in his dreams anyway, which he can’t escape, but even as far gone as he is, he’d rather hit back at dream friends than the real ones.

As if to prove that he’s through ever getting what he wants, Rhodey walks in.

“Next time you could try saying, ‘I’m not in the mood for company.’”

Tony smiles, a genuine one. “Rhodey, I’m not in the mood for company.”

“Cute,” his best friend says. “Problem is, I’ve got shit to do, things to tell you, and they have to go in a particular order. You want to get it all out of your system first, or are you going to scatter in your dungbombs while I tell you what you need to know?”

“You’re quoting Harry Potter, now?” Tony scoffs.

“Yeah, well, those stones were basically magic, and Thanos used them like magic. We’re looking for him right now, but you are decommissioned until you get your strength back,” Rhodes tells him. “There’s something else.”

“Oh, do tell,” Tony says, tasting bile. What else could there _be?_

“Thor was with him when he Snapped. Thanos told Thor he would do one more thing, a gift, he said, for how hard we fought back.”

“What did he do then? Take a shit right there in front of the God of Thunder?” Tony asks, knowing, _relishing_ that Rhodey would hate his crassness.

“I’m not biting today, so you can put all your sass back where it belongs,” Rhodey says instead. “He created a, a new thing. A condition? Soulmates, they’re calling it. You have the first words your Soulmate says to you magically tattooed on your body somewhere, if you’re one of them.”

“You’re making that up. Trying to give me material to mock,” Tony derides him.

“I’m not.” Rhodey unbuttons his shirt sleeve and rolls it up. There, curled around his bicep, are the words, ‘I’m not one for soldiers, but damn!’” He looks about as uncomfortable as Tony has ever seen him, and Tony loves it.

“I don’t know which is better, that you laid your ass on the line to stop that guy and this is your reward, or that you paid good money to put that on your skin just to make me feel better,” Tony says.

“Laugh it up, but when you’re done, do a once-over.”

“I won’t have one, Rhodey. Pepper is gone.” Tony explains it like he’s speaking to a small child.

“Tony,” Rhodey says, his expression bleak. “I think that’s the point. They’re saying these are only for the survivors. It’s only picking out of the survivors, I mean. That’s what they’re saying.”

Tony wants to argue, but it occurs to him that the only thing that could hurt more than losing Pepper was to be told that cosmically, she wasn’t his perfect match anyway. So, he doesn’t do the obvious and ask if Steve Rogers has Peggy Carter’s first words spoken to him written on his body somewhere. Somehow he chases Rhodey away without losing his friendship, and as soon as he’s gone, Tony uses the call button.

“Someone just filled me in on the whole soulmate words thing. I want this put in my chart: I don’t care, I don’t want to know, and I don’t want them in my records, is that clear?”

The look of dismay on the nurse’s face tells Tony that it’s probably already too late. There’s an argument to be made about how readily Earth’s humans seem to have adjusted to a literal mark of the beast, but Tony’s not the one to make it. For the next week and a half before they release him, he refuses any and all washing.

He’s not sure whether they’re releasing him because he’s ready (he’s still weak as hell, in a way he’s never been before, and it’s sobering) or because he _reeks,_ but either is fine with him. Tony gives himself twenty-four hours at home before he’s got to do anything responsible, and the first thing he does is get very, very drunk.

Then, he strips off, gets in the shower, and starts looking.

Tony’s Words are on his thigh, and being drunk doesn’t help.

_Maybe it was too much to expect that you could save the world, but you didn’t stop there, no, you had to take away all my hopes and dreams too!_

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Tony had thought maybe Rhodey was playing a weird, PTSD-inspired joke on him and got somebody to tattoo some temporary insanity onto his skin. But this? No way Rhodey would ever do something this brutal. They’re on his thigh, written out as if his leg was someone’s canvas for cruelty. Tony sinks to his knees in the shower and just stays there, staring, for he doesn’t know how long. He’s lucky he doesn’t drown in there; it’s only thanks to FRIDAY that he doesn’t fall asleep and do just that.

When Tony wakes up the next morning, his first thought is of Pepper. How hard she worked, both to keep him alive and to keep his company afloat. The obvious conclusion is that he can’t let either of those things slip now that she’s not around, not if she would have spent the rest of her life holding him up. The problem is that he’s still _Tony Stark,_ and he’s too selfish for ‘the rest of his life.’ He decides he’ll do a year, but make it a good year.

The results are predictably grandiose.

Tony throws himself into Stark Industries in a way he never had before. The future, Tony says, is in automation and human resources. His company is an innovator in both, becomes a world leader in just a few months. No one should survive the Snap to have to go to work in a factory for barely a living wage. He builds factories of his own and fills them with his innovative machines, adaptable nanotechnology for the most wealthy of his customers, sturdy metal and easily swapped out pieces for everyone else. If he had his way, most humans would only work at jobs that need them there for their brains or creativity, not their ability to mindlessly push a button.

On top of that, he leads a push for worker’s rights. Mandatory grief days. A livable wage, with no compromises for affordable healthcare provided by the company. Modular hours for parents. Modular hours for non parents. He even goes and bitches at Congress about it once. 

All of these things he does because he thinks Pepper would be proud of him. When every new day that passes between then and now is one he isn’t ashamed of, Tony thinks maybe it’s time to start looking into stepping back a bit. He’s done a year, he’s got a good team and a board he actually fucking trusts. The thing he wants most out of what he can actually _have_ is to swap his view of the city for one of green trees and calm waters.

Tony buys property in the middle of nowhere, West Virginia. It’s a stretch of land with most of a lake, covered in trees, lushly green and quiet as hell. He spends a week researching architecture firms and settles on Charriotte, a small but prestigious company headquartered in Washington, D.C. The CEO is a man named Branson Harriot, and Tony flies down to meet with him in person.

The firm emails him a list of suggestions of things to do before the meeting, and it’s a lot more like an audition than he thought. Tony’s competitive, so he’s determined to do what he can to get them to pick his project. He spends the day before setting up a visualization and shows up with his portable holotable mat. Tony can tell that they want the project by the time he’s done. Maybe the mat, too-- his company sells them for a large fortune.

“Here’s the tricky thing,” Harriot says. “I have the perfect person to work on this project, but, well. They were supremely unlucky in the Snap. Lost twelve members of their family.”

Tony’s heard snippets of probability quirks like this on the news, human interest stories of the joys or pains of being one of the people who fate dealt extremely kindly or poorly with. “Twelve! Big family?”

“No, that about wiped them out. The superstitious folks have a field day with the whole thing, unfortunately,” Harriot says. “Both parents, both brothers and their wives, both sisters, various aunts and uncles. But Balci grew up on a farm, loves nature, and honestly Lee’s work is completely gorgeous in situ. Perfect for your plot.” Harriot leans forward on his desk and pins Tony with a pleading look. “Could you, just, create a new email account, keep your last name out of it? Pose as a higher-up in the company, communicate with Lee by email for a little while, early planning stages, all of that?”

The old Tony would never have been okay with this. “Yeah, I could do that. Based on the way you’re asking me, it sounds like it’ll be worth my while.”

“It will, it will,” Harriot says enthusiastically.

Tony creates Mechanic270@StarkIndustries.com and sends it along to Charriotte without expecting too much in the way of a back and forth. He’s pleasantly surprised to discover that he was wrong.

> TO: Mechanic270@StarkIndustries.com
> 
> FROM: FLBalci@Charriotte.com
> 
> SUBJECT: Preliminaries
> 
> Greetings from D.C.,
> 
> I like to get a feel for the people who want to live in the places I design, so I have a few questions that help illuminate that. What colors do you like? Is there a place in your current home that you feel most comfortable in, and can you describe it? Do you enjoy warm or cool shades the most? What makes you think of home?
> 
> That’s probably enough homework for the man giving me a job,
> 
> Balci

> TO: FLBalci@Charriotte.com
> 
> FROM: Mechanic270@StarkIndustries.com
> 
> SUBJECT: Re: Preliminaries
> 
> Hey,
> 
> I was about to get weird about your questions until I realized they’re probably important and you know your stuff. I like warm colors. A lot of the places I’ve lived haven’t been like that, but I wasn’t always the person who a) picked out construction materials, and b) decorated. That’s a strange realization at this age, so I don’t know if I should say thank you or not.
> 
> The home question’s harder. Do me a favor: you go first. What’s home for you?
> 
> ~Mechanic

> TO: Mechanic270
> 
> FROM: FLBalci
> 
> SUBJECT: Home
> 
> Greetings from a finally thawed D.C.,
> 
> That was a very subtle rebuke, and I take it in the spirit with which it was given: it’s a very emotional thing to answer a question like ‘what is home for you’ these days. My apologies.
> 
> I thought about my answer for a few days, then a few more. It’s been over a week, and that’s why. There are people who feel ‘at home’ when climbing in the Himalayas, but not in their own houses, and that’s what I kept coming back to.
> 
> Home to me is about joy. Joy to me is about connectedness and peace. 
> 
> I’ve felt a lot less of that since the Snap. Connecting it to architecture and design before the Snap would involve making sure that spaces allow for connectedness. Kitchens that aren’t cut off and hidden. Dining rooms that are a natural part of the living space and can allow for spillover when hosting guests. A welcoming porch and deck space.
> 
> Now, though? I think more about the individual. Bedrooms that are built to support comfortable sleeping-- no bright morning sunshine if the very thought brings physical pain, for example. Maybe an indoor sunroom over a porch, for an introvert. Hidden balconies, that kind of thing. Inner, over outer peace.
> 
> As for me, the times when I have felt the most joy is either when collaborating at work, or camping in the middle of nowhere. I haven’t quite figured out how I’d turn that into a home, but my tiny apartment along with the whole world as my possible campground will do, for now.
> 
> Your turn,
> 
> Balci

Reading Lee’s email feels like holding a midnight conversation with an old friend. Tony hasn’t had that in forever, and he’s not sure whether to feel violated by the experience, or grateful. Because he has some info to pass along in between the last email he’d sent and Lee’s response, Tony just sends those along without an answer to ‘home.’

This gives him a glimpse into the other man’s subtlety, though, as they spend the next two weeks talking mostly impersonally about logistics-- but in every email Tony receives, the ‘home’ one is quoted underneath. Tony’s pretty sure Lee goes and copies it in, every time. When they hit the third week, he opens Lee’s latest and starts chuckling.

Every instance of the word ‘home’ is in bold.

On a whim, Tony opens the thing in a way that’s meant to strip out formatting from the sender, but they’re _still_ bold. Lee’s hardcoded them that way.

Tony admits to himself that he’s been bested. It’s not that he can’t resist the question, or that he _feels_ defeated, it’s just that Lee’s earned it. If only Tony knew how to answer the question, though…

The fourth week’s about to start when he finally buckles down to write his response. He realizes halfway through that he can’t say exactly what he means, because if you tell someone that you’re used to being able to have a basement full of fancy cars or a landing pad on the penthouse level of your personal tower, that can give away a lot.

> TO: FLBalci
> 
> FROM: Mechanic270
> 
> SUBJECT: Home
> 
> Hey,
> 
> All right, the ‘home’ thing. Home used to be the place I could do whatever I want and have whatever I want. I altered my space to my needs, especially when tinkering on machines.
> 
> I don’t know that I have an emotion connected with ‘home’ like you do, but I grew up wealthy and still am. Most of my living spaces were obtained for status first, functionality second. All of this is coming down to the truth: Home was about the people and the ‘place in the world’ that I lost in the Snap.
> 
> Your comment about inner expressions versus outer ones seems particularly astute. I’m definitely thinking more than doing, lately. You said something about your tiny apartment with the world as your backyard, I like that. I can afford more than tiny, but intimate might be a good word. If excessive wealth is denoted by wide open spaces indoors pre-Snap, this house of mine could have the opposite feel.
> 
> Now that you’ve dragged that out of me, I can see why articulating it is useful. Damn you.
> 
> ~Mechanic
> 
> Ps. Elaborate on what makes camping ‘joyful’ for you

Typing that out and hitting send feels cathartic, and he almost wants to punch Lee for forcing him into it. Tony’s postscript tries to hand the hot seat back, but after only a few personal exchanges with the guy, Tony should have realized what was going to happen.

> TO: Mechanic270
> 
> FROM: FLBalci
> 
> SUBJECT: Home
> 
> Greetings from a fine, clear day in Pennsylvania,
> 
> Spending the weekend at the farm, thought it was a great time to type out an answer, even though I’m off the grid here. I’ll send it later.
> 
> You asked what makes camping joyful for me, and I suspect that’s an attempt to get some of your own back after the ‘home’ standoff. Careful what you wish for?
> 
> Before I lost everyone, I liked the night sky because of its immensity. All those points of light were so distant, so unknowable! If gravity held me in place physically, those stars held me in my cosmic place, in a way.
> 
> I don’t know what your experience was during the actual Snap, but mine was… bad. We were having a family gathering, so it’s not like we were watching the news, or monitoring Twitter updates. We had no warning. Maybe it’s because of not knowing _anything_ beforehand, but I threw myself into finding out everything I could, afterwards.
> 
> So my sense of joy changed, and so did that night sky.
> 
> Mechanic (do you mind giving me a name? Even if it’s not yours?), I didn’t expect to feel the way I do about camping, and maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s incomprehensible, but there was one piece of knowledge I found out about the Snap that changed everything for what I had left of my sanity.
> 
> We were far from the only ones.
> 
> I camp out now, after losing so many loved ones, and I know that some people see the stars as a physical representation of the people we’ve lost, as if their dust floated _up_ and fixed in place, but I have to tell you, I have the opposite reaction. I see them as a representation of what’s left, out there, among those stars. When in the course of human history have we _ever_ been able to look up and feel a kinship with cultures, _creatures_ unknown? Yet, now we can.
> 
> I take joy from the fact that I no longer feel so disconnected from those stars. We share pain. We’re not alone. Do I wish it were for some other reason? Absolutely. But as with everything after the Snap, I take what I can get.
> 
> Bet you’re glad you asked,
> 
> Balci  
>   
> 

_I met some of those creatures,_ Tony doesn’t write back. _Most of them turned to dust in front of me._

Tony wants to know more about Lee’s family, but he doesn’t want to reciprocate. He’s not sure he _can_ talk about who he’s lost, the sheer _magnitude_ of that loss, the way he looked at Stephen Strange and saw in his eyes the certainty that Tony wouldn’t fail. He’s made an uneasy kind of peace with himself about Pepper, he’s shoved how he feels about losing Peter down deep, but the look on that _sorcerer’s_ face will never not hurt.

Truthfully, Tony just wants to buy Lee a beer and thank him for everything he’s done so far. It’s a definite friendship, by now, despite all of Tony’s insular ways over the past year. He’s spent time with Rhodey, that’s about it, and even that friendship is strained, recently.

Rhodey’s the only one Tony let tease him about the Soulmate thing. He didn’t tell Rhodes about what his Words say, just that they’re horrific, which Tony’s frankly grateful for. Those are the first things his so-called Soulmate will ever say to him? Good. They’re distinctive. He’ll be able to avoid her.

Rhodes, though, he hasn’t been all that successful. He tells Tony he stayed away from bars and parties, not that he was that kind of guy when Tony wasn’t around anyway (and Tony is definitely not that kind of guy lately), trying to avoid the kind of situation that would pull words like the ones written on him. He still met the woman, though, and Tony can tell by Rhodey’s voice that he’s fighting a losing battle against her charms.

Tony has largely ignored the whole Soulmate phenomenon. He wasn’t much for television, he’s got his own music collection, he doesn’t socialize much lately, and he definitely doesn’t watch the news if he can help it. He’s heard that there’s a whole new kind of makeup designed to hide them for those unlucky enough to have Words where everyone can read them. He doesn’t have to worry about that. Tony’s are on his inner thigh, and he’s one of the most recognizable people on the planet. Anyone close enough to read them will be someone he wants to be there.

The strange thing is that he hasn’t really wanted to be that close to, well, anybody. The first few months he’d been back, Tony spent all his time on the company and that hasn’t really slowed down much. He never did do the wild, miserable, drunken things he’d told himself would be his reward.

Getting older isn’t really the problem. He’s more serious, now, and that’s just a drag.

> TO: FLBalci
> 
> FROM: Mechanic270
> 
> SUBJECT: Fundraiser
> 
> Hey,
> 
> I attached the things you requested at the end, but I had a question. Would your company be interested in joining mine in donating anonymously to the Shore Up foundation? Before you give me shit for it, I am aware that asking like this is not anonymous, but it’s a cause that means a lot to me.
> 
> Shore Up started out helping hurricane victims by buying their property and giving them the equity to move away from dangerous areas. Nowadays they’re involved in providing proper internet access, to the point of paying for the infrastructure needed when the utilities balk. My company’s been supporting them for years, but they’ve really ramped up in the past one.
> 
> Let me know? No is a complete sentence, no judgment,
> 
> Tony (that’s my name, you said you’d like it and I forgot four emails in a row)

Lee has become a friend, for all that they’ve never met or chatted anywhere else than email. Tony frets about putting his real name on there, sure that he’s left enough breadcrumbs to make it obvious who he really is.

> TO: Mechanic270
> 
> FROM: FLBalci
> 
> SUBJECT: Re: Fundraiser
> 
> Greetings from a rainy rest stop,
> 
> Writing this quickly on my way from a final wrap-up in Virginia. Thanks for the invitation. I spoke to Branson about it and he’s happy to donate.
> 
> Full disclosure, though: Shore Up was the reason why I found an apartment in D.C. and didn’t go quietly insane, after the Snap. They kitted out the farm (and you didn’t read me wrong before, I *can* go off grid, but I don’t have to), connected me with some people who had been unlucky in their losses, too.
> 
> It’s a great organization. I’m pleased to hear you’re involved with them, Tony.
> 
> Balci
> 
> Ps. let me know what you think about a site visit sometime in the next month

The idea of actually physically implementing some of the things he and Lee have been figuring out about the house fuels Tony’s mood all day. The anticipation persists late into the night, when he gets an idea.

Tony’s never really been camping. He was never a boy scout, literally or figuratively. He’s been thinking about the location in West Virginia, though-- it’s pretty far from basically everything. Tony decides to suggest camping out on the site, figuring if Lee isn’t up for it, that’s fine. Camping under the not-so-unfeeling stars might be a private thing, for him.

> TO: FLBalci
> 
> FROM: Mechanic270
> 
> SUBJECT: Site Visit
> 
> Hey,
> 
> I had a thought. My plot’s pretty remote. What if instead of getting rooms at the nearest, still very distant hotel, we just camped out? I don’t have any gear, but I’ll buy whatever, or I can reimburse you.
> 
> As for scheduling, that depends-- camping? No camping? Let me know.
> 
> Tony

> TO: Mechanic270
> 
> FROM: FLBalci
> 
> SUBJECT: Re: Site Visit
> 
> Greetings from the office in D.C.,
> 
> I looked up the weather in that area in early May, and camping is doable, but chilly. If you’re comfortable with me using the credit line you extended to Charriotte, I can use that for supplies. I’d drive up, then, since it’s halfway between D.C. and the farm anyway, so I can bring the food, if that’s fine with you? I just can’t promise when I’ll get there for sure, so I’d need to skip out on picking you up at the airport.
> 
> Only one caveat, and I am only mentioning this because of professional norms and how important your contract is to Branson: camping attire will be less than office-worthy. I’ll be a different person than you expect, almost certainly. If that’s all right with you, I’ll start ordering you a tent and the other necessities.
> 
> No problem if you have to renege,
> 
> Balci
> 
> Ps. you eat S’mores, right? The whole contract’s off if you hate S’mores, no exceptions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tagged a few other characters but the first chunk of the story, nearly all of part I, is mostly just Tony and Leigh, just so you know.


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony's mind was calibrated for Camping Bros, but what he got instead was a punch-in-the-gut attraction to his very female architect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Friday counts as the weekend, right?
> 
> I just really wanted you to meet Leigh! What can I say, I'm an addict-- addicted to writing like my life depends on it, and then addicted to hearing how the readers felt about what I wrote! It means the world, folks, thanks so much.

### Chapter Two

Tony sits back in his office after getting Lee’s email about the site visit and lets out a long, slow breath. Planning is one thing, but it looks like they are about to transition to really building this thing Tony has allowed himself to look forward to for over a year, now. It’s exciting.

Now all that remains is for Lee not to be upset when he finds out that Tony is Tony _Stark._ Tony’s in a strange situation here, because he hasn’t done anything like the research Lee likely has about the Snap. He didn’t _have_ to. What kind of mangling of the truth has the world press done? What is Lee’s impression of ‘Billionaire Superhero Tony Stark?’

He asks Rhodey, or rather tries to, but he is unavailable for the first time in forever. Tony wants to feel happy for him, but he can’t help but think his friend has accepted the yoke of something that will force him into some terrible catch he’s not expecting. Thanos’s ‘gift’ is tainted. It has to be.

After renting a pickup at the airport, he enjoys the thirty-minute drive of paved roads before he gets to the dirt ones and has to roll his windows up. He’s got a baseball cap, jeans, sneakers, and a Metallica shirt on, but his ARC reactor will stay in his truck. He still isn’t at the place where he could leave it at home, but this hollowed-out world isn’t ever going to earn his trust enough to do without it completely.

He parks beside the pickup that’s already there, a bright red beauty of a truck. It has Pennsylvania plates on it, so he’s pretty sure it’s Lee’s. Tony gets out and looks around. He can’t see Lee, but the property is decently sized, and a lot of the area next to the lake has clusters of bushes that obscure his view. It’s a warm day, and Tony walks up to the lake, testing the mud around it with the tip of his sneaker. That’s when he sees it-- a footprint. It looks pretty small, and Tony wonders if someone’s kid from a neighboring plat went walkabout.

The view along the shore is pretty clear to the left, so Tony starts to walk around toward the right, keeping his eye out for any kids as he looks for Lee. When he comes up on the bushes, Tony slows down, hoping maybe he’ll catch the kid. He peeks through the branches and just stares.

There isn’t a kid walking around barefoot on the lake’s shore.

It’s a woman.

She’s wearing a cheerful-looking sundress, light green scattered with yellow and white flowers. He can’t help but notice it shows off a lot of leg, but what’s really noteworthy about her is the mass of honey blonde hair piled on top of her head. It’s a masterpiece of messy twists and flyaways, like a wig in a fantasy movie.

She isn’t facing him but he already thinks she’s beautiful. Tony watches her, feeling like a voyeur in the aforementioned fantasy movie, hoping she’ll turn around. He sees that she’s got a messenger bag on one shoulder, an incongruously sturdy leather thing, completely at odds with the flower child image she’s got going.

He backs off and takes stock of what to do. It’s possible that Lee has a girlfriend that he’s brought along last-minute. It’s also possible, given the beauty of the lake, that this woman has come from a neighboring property for a walk. He hadn’t put up ‘no trespassing’ signs, not yet, though he knows he’ll want to do that soon.

Tony’s got a Satellite uplink for his phone, so he backtracks a good twenty or thirty feet more and calls up Charriotte in lieu of calling Lee, whose number he doesn’t have.

_“Good afternoon, this is Marissa from Charriotte Design speaking, how may I direct your call?”_

“Yes, hello,” Tony says. “I’m meant to be on-site with Lee Balci today, and I just want to make sure there aren’t any crossed wires, that kind of thing.” He phrases it like this on purpose. On the off chance there was a concern Lee brought up at work, this woman might assume that’s what he is referring to, and mention it.

_“Lee wasn’t in this morning, and the schedule implies she’s off the rest of this week-- I’m sorry, can I put you on hold?”_

It’s not a video call, but Tony stares at the phone in his hand. _She?_

 _“Sir?”_ the tinny voice calls out. _“Sir?”_

“I’m here,” Tony says, clearing his throat because the words don’t sound quite right.

_“Can you confirm that you are the client from Stark Industries? I have Lee on the other line and she’s concerned about a strange man on the property, says he hasn’t approached her.”_

As if to reinforce what the secretary just said, Tony hears the sound of a gun cocking. He looks over his shoulder, careful not to make a sudden move, and the woman he’d been staring at is standing on this side of the bushes, pointing a gun directly at his head.

He was right.

She’s _gorgeous._

Tony already had his hand up by his face, and he slowly shifts its position to gesture to himself. He turns so his face is fully visible-- he _is_ one of the most recognizable people on the planet, after all.

“Tony,” he says to the woman, identifying himself.

Her reaction is everything he had feared it might be. Her face pales and the gun (which she’d been pointing at him with expert precision, meaning she knows how to shoot it, which he really shouldn’t find attractive) lowers to first his chest, then the ground. Lee makes the gun safe and tucks it away in her bag, all the while looking utterly shaken. She pulls something else out and backs away.

 _“Sir!”_ the voice on the phone demands.

“Yes, hi, I was making contact with Lee,” Tony tells the woman. “I think we’re good here, thanks for the help.” He’s just about to hang up when he hears the secretary ask him to wait. 

Feet away, he sees that the woman in the sundress is speaking quietly on the phone, one hand to her throat. Her body language is closed down; arms crossed, shoulders tight, legs close together. He wonders if he’s just lost a contract and a friend just by virtue of being Tony Stark.

 _“Mr. Stark?”_ the voice on the phone calls out. He lifts it and turns so he doesn’t see Lee’s reaction to whatever bad news he’s about to hear. _“Lee didn’t get a chance to let you know ahead of time about this, but she’s recovering from laryngitis. Wants to know if you’re okay with written communication, and says she’s extremely sorry for the inconvenience.”_

Tony shoots a look over at Lee, who is now tapping out something on her phone, her conversation with the secretary apparently over. It’s _not_ a StarkPhone, which is rare nowadays. That unfortunately tracks with her reaction to recognizing him, though.

“That’s fine,” Tony hears himself agreeing, his eyes on Lee. She reacts, closing her eyes in relief, and it slices at him a little bit, this unexpected woman who was worried he wouldn’t trust her if she couldn’t speak. It’s a relief too, in a way, because if _that’s_ what she was worried about, then she clearly didn’t demand an end to the contract. He refocuses on his own phone conversation. Laryngitis, she’d said. “I’ve had that a couple of times. It’s fine. Thanks,” he says, and ends the call. Tony and Lee look at each other for a moment, and then he smiles, holding up his finger. “I’ve got-- I brought you something. I’ll be right back.”

Tony turns and starts jogging toward the pickups. His mind and body had been calibrated for Camping Bros. This woman’s struck him in a way he wasn’t expecting, with her long legs and thick golden hair. Tony’s completely off-kilter; he’s got to correct for this, and fast. He gives himself exactly three seconds to rest his forehead on the sun-warmed metal of the car before hauling the door open and fishing out the StarkPad he’d brought as a gift to Lee Balci.

Tony almost drops it when he turns around and she’s standing there. It’s his first full view of her face, and yes, he had been completely right. She’s lovely, with big brown eyes and a dusting of freckles. He tells himself he is _not allowed to stare,_ so Tony holds out the device apologetically, thumbing the power button as he does so.

“You don’t get to unbox it, but that’s because I hacked it to put a bunch of things you don’t usually get on one of these. This case is a special design, holds a stylus,” he tells her. She’s still barefoot, and her feet are dirty, and it’s _charming,_ and Tony senses that he might be in trouble, here.

She walks around to her pickup, and he follows her. He’s parked on the other side, so there’s space for her to open the driver’s door wide and climb up so she can sit and set up the tablet. It’s not one of the transparent ones, because those are really pricey and Tony hadn’t wanted his new friend Lee to think he was buying him off.

He’s really, really glad he made that call right now.

Instead of taking advantage of the way the truck’s cab height gives him a great view of her legs, Tony goes over to get the rest of his stuff from the vehicle. Once there, though, he realizes something. _He_ didn’t know she was a woman, but she did, and she was comfortable with camping out anyway. That says something about her confidence and her level of trust for him, but it isn’t set in stone now that she knows he’s Tony Stark. So, he leaves his bag where it is, and comes back with just his own StarkPad.

When she sees him, she smiles, and Tony bites his lip from the inside. Then, she holds up her tablet.

 **I’m Leigh Balci. Nice to meet you,** **Tony Stark**

“Do you want me to write mine out, too?” he asks, gesturing to what’s in his hand. Leigh shakes her head. He looks up at her and says, “So which one of us got the bigger shock, do you think?”

Her smile widens, and she points to him. 

“I’ll buy that,” he agrees.

Leigh makes a twirling motion with one finger pointed down. Tony shakes his head, confused. She narrows her eyes a bit at him, and starts writing with the stylus.

**Turn around.**

**I have to get down.**

Tony suddenly realizes what she means, and he pops a thumbs up and walks away, feeling stupid for not realizing her issue sooner. The Tony Stark of five years ago might have lifted up his own StarkPad and used its black mirror to watch her get down in that dress, but he _likes_ Lee-- _Leigh, now_ \--and he values her friendship more than that.

“Do you want me to find a hotel?” he calls out. “I offer so you don’t have to feel obligated, but I’d like to proceed as planned.” He hears a ripping sound, but it doesn’t quite sound right, as if she’s unzipping something that pings every time it breaks apart a tine. Tony grabs his bag and shoulders it, then walks around the pickup-- to find that Leigh’s now wearing a white shirt edged with lace, and a pair of jean shorts covered with flower patches. He stands there for a moment, confused and increasingly aware that he should not stare at this woman if he ever wants her to trust him.

Leigh takes pity on him.

**Snaps.**

She holds up the dress, which looks as if it had been unsnapped from neck to hem.

“I’ll uh, carry some of this, then,” Tony says, _needing_ to cover his face, because he’s not going to picture that, _not_ _going to picture that,_ yep, he’s picturing it. “Lead on, I’ll trust your expertise.”

Tony does help with the tents, even though he’s sorely tempted to act like his old self and sit down to watch her put them up. In the back of his mind, he keeps asking himself if she knew who he was, if that was why she brought an unsnappable dress to a campsite with him. Eventually, though, Tony starts thinking with his head again, and they get the campsite set up. As he watches her putter around putting the final touches on things, Tony realizes that he’s judging her by his metric, not by hers. She’s brought a hummingbird feeder to clip to her tent, for God’s sake.

It’s not naiveté, either. Leigh Balci seems sincere as hell, she’s just somehow also the living embodiment of cottagecore, and not because she’s trying to impress anybody. Tony knows. Women who want to impress him wear Iron Man swimsuits under their work clothes if he’s going to be in the area. They lift their tops to show him tattoos of his face or his ARC reactor on their breasts. They think he likes flashy sex kittens, and he _does,_ but nowhere near as much as he used to. It was easier to be a completionist when he was trying to have as much fun as he could before responsibility hit him in the face.

While Tony has a mini crisis about what he finds attractive anymore, Leigh single handedly drags a huge cooler full of ice and food to the site.

“Okay,” Tony chuckles, impressed. He gets up from his camp chair and points at the unlit fire. “You mind?”

She collapses into her own chair and waves him ahead. He lights the fire with a repulsor, something he’s done before to a more appreciative audience, but that’s cool. He can already tell that cooking on an open fire is more complicated than it looks, so he cheats and gets his headset, asking FRIDAY about temperatures and the like. While he’s doing that, Leigh putters around near the cooler. He’s just about ready to find out what to cook when she touches his arm, and he jumps.

“Sorry. Turns out people don’t get that close to me, anymore.”

She offers him a sad sort of smile for that, but then gestures to the folding table she’s pulled out of somewhere. It’s got a meal’s worth of things to cook, and that’s how Tony ends up making food alongside a woman he didn’t even know existed, less than three hours after meeting her. It’s delicious. She’s one of those people who know a few obscure spices that change everything.

Tony’s pretty sure she’s just one of those people that changes everything.

Leigh turns in early. She writes that she’s still recovering from her illness, gesturing to her throat. Tony watches her duck into her tent, pulling pins out of her hair as she goes. He half hopes the mass of hair will fall while she’s still in sight, but has no luck.

That night, he thinks about Pepper.

It makes sense, in an odd way. This is the first time he’s been so strongly attracted to anyone since, and Pepper had been his first really long-term committed relationship where he had felt safe and free to be himself. He spends some time just comparing the two women, as if knowing Leigh from her emails and spending a couple of hours with her is any basis of comparison with a woman he’d lived around and relied on for years before he even truly _knew_ her.

They’re alike, in strange ways. Both incredibly feminine, he feels, even though Pepper Potts was feminine in a way that _models_ aspire to, all power suits and perfect makeup and killer heels. Leigh is much softer, so soft that he can’t even imagine what she’d do if she had to creep into an ARC reactor room full of broken glass and sabotage it.

Tony spends time thinking about how they’re alike and how they’re different and how much he really misses Pepper even though it doesn’t make him ache the same way anymore. Then he realizes that he’s objectified his new friend in a really disturbing way, a shameful way, a presumptuous way. Embarrassment flames up in his gut not unlike the Extremis test subjects, all hot and uncontrollable and maybe related to a huge, irrevocable mistake.

Leigh Balci drew a gun on him and _put it away_ when she realized who exactly he was, not the other way around. She doesn’t deserve this from him.

Tony resolves to stop thinking of her as if she’s some sort of moon to Pepper’s sun. He tells himself he’ll be different in the morning. He _orders_ himself to.

8888888888

He wakes up to the smell of coffee.

Tony checks with FRIDAY and finds out it’s 7:30 AM. He peeks out the front flap of his tent and sees a sign that Leigh’s left him on the side of one of the food packages from the day before.

**Sleep in if you want.**

**Coffee’ll be warm when you wake up.**

He risks a look around the camp for her and spots her standing beside her tent with a coffee mug, eyes closed, head tipped up toward the sun. Her hair is in a long, fat braid resting over one shoulder, and she’s wearing a white blouse and a cornflower blue skirt full of gathers that her toes barely peep out of.

Tony crawls back into his sleeping bag. He’s utterly screwed.

For one truly ridiculous second, he contemplates putting on the ARC reactor, tapping on the nanosuit, and claiming there’s a work emergency before flying away.

8888888888

Tony comes out after twenty minutes of self-recrimination. Leigh’s got some clever contraption that lets her pull aside some separators and shake it, and boom! pancake mix without the mess. He teases her about pancake art, and she retreats to the cooler for a few minutes while he makes some pancakes of his own. When she comes back, it’s with a cup of mix she’d squirted out and dyed with mashed blueberries. Then, she proceeds to make a pancake that passably looks like his arc reactor, a triangle of blueberry mash and regular pancake. Once flipped, though, it’s horrifying, and they both laugh and try to encourage the other to eat it with hand gestures.

It goes in the fire, and Tony’s heart is full of a warm, pleased feeling he hasn’t enjoyed in a really long time.

It’s with that feeling heating him up from the inside that he and Leigh walk around to figure out where the best place for his house would be. Tony’s brought battery-powered projectors that he places at strategic points to create a blue wall of holographic light. They mark the boundaries of his favorite location and Leigh writes out that they’ll have to do some other preliminary work, but it’s a solid start. She’s obviously pleased.

“Do you want me to cook again?” he asks when it comes up to dinner time. Leigh shakes her head.

**I’ll do it, but, chat?**

“Absolutely,” Tony says. There were sandwiches for lunch, and her pancake setup hadn’t been super close to the flames. As she arranges pans and the cast-iron skillet for dinner, though, Tony winces as he sees her skirt come close to catching fire multiple times. “You’re a fire hazard,” he tells her. “Might want to change out of the skirt.”

Leigh looks down, stepping back quickly in alarm. She sets her hands on her hips and frowns, before grabbing her tablet.

**Thanks, it’s my favorite**

“It’s pretty,” Tony says. “I’ll give you some privacy.” He gets up and heads toward the lake. They’re in a valley, and the sun sets differently here, the light cut in half much earlier than he would have expected. So when he turns around to look at how far he’s walked, Tony’s shocked by the fact that he can see Leigh’s silhouette in her tent, backlit by their large fire. Leigh leans over right as he turns around, and her skirt falls to the floor of her tent, leaving the shape of her bare legs visible.

His heart pounds. She can’t see him; the tent’s walls aren’t thick, but it’s the same model as his, opaque except for the shadows of nearby things. He’s far away, and it’s only the unique situation of the half-light and the fire that means he can see her at all. Still, Tony turns away. The image is indelible, he’ll probably never be able to shake it: the warm (everything is warm around her, he’s come to realize) orange of the tent combined with the firelight, and the shadow of her curves, unexpected and devastating.

Tony kicks a rock into the lake and tells fate or his libido or _something_ that it’s past time to settle the fuck down. If he’s not careful, the last few days are going to be written on his memory banks as something very different than he intended. He walks and walks some more, trying to walk the tingle of attraction away. By the time he angles back around to their tents, he can smell a fully cooked steak and realizes he’s been unfair to Leigh in a different way.

Because his body just won’t accept the rules he’s been trying to enforce, Tony comes clean, hoping her knowledge of what he’d seen would make him feel ashamed enough to stop thinking of her that way.

“Hey, I didn’t mean to ditch you. I looked back and caught a glimpse of you changing in silhouette, purely by accident. Decided to take a walk, as penance.” He doesn’t look at her face, doesn’t want to see her expression. “That smells amazing, I’m ready to admit I would not have done as well with those steaks.”

Tony sits down and waits for her response, forgetting that it’ll be visual. He hears the swipe of her stylus against glass, and looks over to see her smirking in the firelight.

**I think you didn’t want to make dinner, and that’s your excuse**

“It wasn’t, but I’ll be glad to adopt your version of events,” he says. “Better that than an article in the weekend newspapers, ‘Exclusive: Tony Stark’s Empire Collapses Under Steak Allegations.’”

He had been so sure she would laugh, but Leigh’s expression falls. She bites her lip, presses her eyes closed for a brief moment, and when she opens them, she’s a ghost of the person she had been, seconds before. All Tony can think of is that he’s just reminded her who he is, which in turn reminded her of what he’d failed to save.

“Can I get your food? Stay right there.” He pops up and starts looking for plates, only to find that she’d already set two up. “Okay, I can hand it to you.”

Tony turns around slowly, convinced she’ll be gone, but she’s getting up to come over. He hands her one of the plates, the one that has the most appetizing steak on it from what he can tell under the cellophane she’d wrapped them both in. With her other hand, Leigh makes the hand gesture for ‘thank you.’

“You’re welcome,” he murmurs, looking over at her. “As long as you’re not Italian. That’s a whole different gesture.”

Leigh laughs, and he’s relieved. Still, the specter of her reaction sits with them now, and Tony understands that it’s something that won’t be soothed so easily. 

That Leigh’s the one with the olive branch after their mostly silent dinner isn’t surprising, but Tony feels convicted by it, a little. She’s brought the makings for S’mores. As they roast their marshmallows, he regales her with the tales of the contraptions he designed as a kid to try to perfectly heat the marshmallows and chocolate without burning his fingers. Each year, they got more involved, of course, and she laughs until she clutches her throat in pain as he describes their epic failures in great detail.

He doesn’t tell her that he’d always wanted to show them to his father, but he was never available. Or that he found out his nanny actually hated S’mores after all the years of eating them with gusto because she had wanted him to feel accomplished and loved. That’s not what the stories are about, right now.

Finally, after licking her fingers clean, Leigh grabs the tablet.

**Out of the whole family I was always the worst at these**

Tony winces, understands immediately.

**Practice doesn’t always make perfect!**

“I get it. I was always shit at knitting.”

Leigh mimes throwing the tablet at him, but sets it aside to start clearing away the plates. She’d pinned her long braid up that morning and it’s been slowly slipping out of its confinement all day. Tony feels a powerful urge to tug on it and recognizes very well what the full spectrum of that urge means. It scares the hell out of him.

“Let me guess-- you’re a champion knitter,” he says, for once sitting back to watch her instead of helping. “You probably knitted those leggings. Thread almost too tiny to see, two hundred fifty stitches an inch, admit it.”

Leigh turns and looks at him, her face lit up with amusement, braid about to let go, and opens her mouth to say something. As Tony watches, she catches herself, her eyes going wide, and she turns away as if she’s almost done something shameful. The force from turning her head so quickly puts paid to the last pin, and her braid spirals free. She starts writing something on the tablet that he can’t see, and sets it on her chair face-down. Then, to the sounds of the singing cicadas and the crackling fire, Leigh finishes putting the dishes in their containers, and heads to her tent.

He’d sat and let her do what she needed to do, but now Tony snatches her tablet to flip it over.

**Don’t ask, please.**

**Goodnight.**

Tony reminds himself that anyone with even a rudimentary amount of knowledge will know that the Avengers and their associates were the ones who fought Thanos and failed to stop him. And Iron Man is one of the most prominent among their number. He can’t skip ahead, she needs to actually get used to him. If he wants this woman’s friendship, if he wants this woman’s _anything,_ he can’t forget that.

And he does. Oh, he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like Tony's not quite his bantery self in this chapter, but I can promise he totally is, later on, so I'm going to chalk this one up to him being off-balance. Just wanted to reassure you, though.


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony decides that his goal for groundbreaking day is that Leigh Balci is going to speak to him for the first time since he met her. It’s an odd situation, an odd goal, all things considered, so he keeps it to himself. No need to jinx it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has some emotional heft. Tony and Leigh are both messed up by the Snap, in their various ways. Also, my version of FRIDAY is probably more casual/has more personality than the 'real' version, but IMO Tony tweaked her programming to be that way, without Pepper.
> 
> I have poor chapter posting impulse control. *shrugs*

###  Chapter Three

Tony doesn’t push her, in the morning. He remains coolly neutral and respectful, but he does silently note that she’s wearing a lot of layers. He catches a glimpse of the leggings (did she sleep in them? Did he make her afraid to change in her own damned tent?) under her favorite skirt. Over the white blouse is a sunny yellow cardigan that’s knitted, possibly handmade.

They start to take down the tents and put everything away in silence, and it feels so condemning that Tony pulls out his phone, walks over to Leigh, and hands it to her with the music app up.

“Pick a playlist? I’m dying, here.”

She levels her rich brown eyes at him for a few seconds, a tiny smile haunting her mouth, and then nods. He doesn’t name his playlists anymore,  _ thank God, _ but for the amount of scrolling she’s doing, it’s possible she might get down to the ones from back when he did. Finally, she picks something, taps it, and hands the phone back.

The screen is dark, but he can hear quiet music starting to build, so he gives her a bit of a suspicious look, cranks the volume, and sets the phone up before he resumes taking his tent down. Leigh had only scrolled up and down, then tapped, so he knows the song is in his library, but it takes a long time to build, and he doesn’t recognize it.

Until he does, and his hands still. Nothing Else Matters, by Metallica. 

He can’t change it, because doing that would just betray how well the lyrics of the damned song fit. It’s about trust, and opening up. Tony forces himself to keep going, doesn’t turn around, doesn’t acknowledge anything. Maybe Leigh liked the title, maybe she’s not much for metal music and chose a ballad, there’s a million explanations that don’t have to have a deeper meaning.

_ Never opened myself this way / Life is ours, we live it our way. _ Eventually the song ends, the playlist shifts to a harder one, and after a while the site looks pretty much the way it had before, with flatter, trampled grass. Tony offers Leigh money for the supplies, and she reminds him via the tablet that she used the line of credit he’d extended to the company. 

He makes a flippant comment about still emailing, and she nods without a smile, and he’ll take it, but  _ ouch. _ He hops into the pickup and pulls out his phone, pretending to look down at it as he looks at her reflection in his side mirror. She’s covered her face with both hands, and when she drops them she’s looking up at the sky, shaking her head. Tony starts the truck, and she moves out of the way, waving with a wan smile.

Tony thinks there’s a 50% chance she’ll offload the project, or at the very least, all communication. On the drive to the airport, he impulsively orders FRIDAY not to let him look up anything to do with Leigh Balci for a full two weeks, starting immediately. Only exceptions are for the project they’re working on.

He regrets that the second he sets foot in the door at home, but FRIDAY is implacable.

At first he tries to banish all thoughts of her, because he doesn’t want to push too hard when it comes to the emails. Ideally, she’ll send the first one. So Tony doesn’t let himself think about her.

That first night he dreams of honeybees. The house he’s so excited to build is finished, and out in neat lines by the lake are five beehive boxes, just like he saw in a video once. Tony wears his Iron Man suit out to collect the honey, in this dream, and is swarmed. He goes back and tries wearing the regular suit, the kind that looks like something the bad medical people wore in the ET movie, and he’s swarmed again.

Only when dream-Tony walks out wearing his regular clothes do the bees welcome him, their honeycombs bursting with rich, golden honey. When he wakes up it feels like he’s had that dream every night for a week, even though it was the first time. He has the dream repeatedly over the next two weeks, and one of the times really sticks with him. In that one, he reaches out and grabs a gooey, warm handful of honey, right from the comb. The golden color spills over his fingers, down the back of his hand. When he wakes up, it’s with the image of Leigh’s hair in his hand, instead. Before he understands what he’s doing, he brings that hand to his face and smells it. Tony’s disappointed when it doesn’t smell like a woman’s shampoo.

He asks FRIDAY what the date is, and groans when there’s still three days left of his Leigh embargo. The whole idea was a complete failure; in fact it may have even made him think about her more than if he’d gotten it out of his system right away. He’s not used to  _ waiting. _

“FRIDAY, come on. This just made things wors--”

_ “Can’t do it, Boss,” _ his AI interrupts with her insolent deference.  _ “Not sure why you chose a full two weeks.” _

“I thought, this is the earliest you can email her, so maybe keeping her out of your brain for that long will help. Spoilers: it did not. Not at all. This is doing a friend of mine a disservice, FRIDAY. This turned me into an obsessive.”

_ “Oh, I think we both know that’s not true.” _

Tony has one more thing to try. “It’s my birthday tomorrow!”

_ “That sounds like a failure to plan ahead, Boss.” _

He didn’t think it would work, but it had been worth the shot. He could recode FRIDAY, hell, he could drop by a fucking library, make a show of giving a donation, and search her up at one of the kiosks. But it’s the principle of the thing, and so he’ll wait, like he ought to.

“Okay, well, I’m off for three days, the embargo lifts in three, gimme a project I set aside. This is a good time to get lost in something.”

He chooses the bunker protocol, an emergency safe room that will construct itself around him if he calls it. It’s impractical and possibly dangerous, but it has the level of complication that he’s looking for. The logistics that he has to sort through to make it even remotely possible are exactly the right kind of distracting.

8888888888

Tony had been hoping that fate would send him a message from Leigh on his birthday, but the whole day passes with nothing. Then, very late in the evening, he gets a notification.

> TO: Mechanic270
> 
> FROM: FLBalci
> 
> SUBJECT: Next Steps
> 
> Greetings from your exhausted friend,
> 
> Sorry for the radio silence (as opposed to actual silence, recently!). I lost a colleague to a heart attack two days after I got back from West Virginia. Because we’re about to start a new phase with your build, I set that aside and picked up for Frank as best I could. I wanted to at least get his client in to choose a new architect or advise on a new firm. It was rough.
> 
> I only just tonight finished transitioning him over to Branson, who is picking up the project personally. I don’t know why, but it felt like I should let you know what’s been going on before I pack up and head home. I’d like to extend a professional apology for not communicating about this sooner; it’s the first time many of us have lost someone since, well. Since.
> 
> Frank and his wife lost their only daughter in the Snap. His wife isn’t coping very well, and neither am I, which is selfish as fuck because we weren’t even that close. I’m probably not going to hit send on this, but it’s cathartic, so whatever.
> 
> When I was little, my parents were the ‘kneel by the side of the bed and say your prayers’ kind. I used to forget family members as I listed them to pray. I hated it. Is it bad that I feel guilty about that, now? 
> 
> _ Stars, _ I know we all cope in our own ways, but how,  _ how, _ Tony, do you cope? Or do you? I should turn off the computer and go home, I’m tired and sloppy and I bet you didn’t know I swore at all, much less this much.
> 
> Because it’s what we do, I’ll answer that tough question, ‘cause I don’t want to imagine what sort of question you’d come up with in its stead. How do *I* cope, you ask?
> 
> Every month, I picked a family member and I took part in one of their favorite things. This month was the last one, so I’m finally done with all thirteen. If you know about me, you’re probably making a face, right? ‘But Leigh, all the news articles say you lost twelve relatives in the Snap!’ It was thirteen, if you count my sister-in-law’s unborn baby. 
> 
> Lara was married to Kent, my parents’ second son. Charlie, the oldest, he was married to Missy, and they wanted kids since forever. Married for ten years, no kids. So when Lara got pregnant, she only told Kent, me, and Mom, because they didn’t want to hurt Missy if there was a loss, you know?
> 
> And there was. A loss, I mean. They were all lost. So last night, in honor of Lana and Kent’s baby, after I got home from work I curled up in bed, nice and tight in the blankets, and I spoke out loud about every single wonderful memory I had of that baby’s parents. Went through a whole box of kleenex and a voice box too, it feels like. I ache.
> 
> I used to think of what I would do if there was a way to reverse the Snap. I know you and your team tried to stop it with all your might, down to your very last atom. If I could help that baby come back, Tony, I think I’d do just about anything.
> 
> This is dumb, okay, but: if you ever find out a way, tell me. Let me help. I don’t care if it’s to sew up the holes in everyone’s socks before they leave, I want to help. It’s a dick move for me to even bring it up, but I cried about as much water as sits in your lake last night, and I’m dried up and sad about Frank, and Lana, and Kent, the baby, Missy, and Charlie, and everyone.
> 
> I’ll only ever ask you this once, Tony, and then I’ll never bring it up again, I swear to God.
> 
> Please tell me you punched that guy.
> 
> I just… I need to know.
> 
> All right, I’ll delete this in the morning,
> 
> Leigh

Tony stares at the name at the end of her email, looks at the time, and realizes that she’d probably hit send by rote, by accident, when she was done typing it. Somewhere in D.C. right now, Leigh’s probably got her hand over her mouth in shock, realizing what she just did. There is a tidal wave of emotion Tony’s holding back. The thing is, he realizes he can help-- but he has to do it  _ right NOW. _

> TO: FLBalci
> 
> FROM: Mechanic270
> 
> SUBJECT: I did.
> 
> I punched him, Leigh. A whole lot. 

_ And then he killed me, _ Tony doesn’t type. He hits send, instead. Then, because it’s no fun being a billionaire if you can’t do impulsive things for your friends, he sends a taxi to Charriotte, the kind where the guy parks, knocks to tell you they’re there, and holds the doors open for his passenger. He gets the message that it arrived, five minutes after he sent the order.

Leigh shouldn’t have to drive home feeling like that. Or ride public transport.

There are stories all across the  _ universe _ like hers.

“Happy Birthday, Tony,” he says. He didn’t get himself anything, but tonight, her email feels like it might be what he deserves.

8888888888

In the first week of June, Tony gets a call from Branson Harriot asking if he’d like to come to D.C. and formally fill out all of the paperwork to start the construction. He’ll be finalizing certain parts of the house, with more specific internal stuff still to be determined. Harriot tells him that he gave Leigh the week off, and he knows it’s unconventional, but, he says, ‘knowing Leigh, she’ll drop by anyway.’

Tony jumps at the chance. He offers to come the next day. He’s coming off of a two day Leigh Balci marathon, having watched all footage of her that had been obtained by the news agencies who wrote about her as a human interest story. He’s read hundreds of articles (it’s really astonishing how many websites just crib off of each other!), watched family films, seen her riding a horse with her hair flowing out behind her, the whole nine yards.

He had known when he woke up the morning his embargo lifted that he was about to do something irrevocable. Tony’s not stupid, he knows he has a crush, and fostering it has potential to make it grow into something else. But this feels wonderful, the kind of exhilarating that you can’t replicate with adrenaline. She’s not entirely indifferent to him, he’s certain of that, but she’s also no easy mark. For once,  _ he’s  _ the pursuer, not the pursued.

Tony thinks about the dream where he woke up seeing his hand buried in Leigh’s hair. He hopes that might someday be possible. There have been women in the past he’s seen and wondered what a night with them would be like, but Pepper had grown on him so slowly before he couldn’t do without her that this thing with Leigh is an entirely different beast. Tony wonders what a night with Leigh would be like, aches to find out, yes-- but he’s kind of curious about what a  _ life _ with her might be like, too.

Now he doesn’t know whether he’s grateful (this is too new of a conclusion for him to be in  _ any _ way prepared to see her in person) or disappointed (he just…  _ really _ wants to see her) that she’s off this week. He wears one of his nicest suits just in case.

Besides the prospect of seeing Leigh, though, Tony’s excited about his house. So, after settling in at Charriotte, he gets engrossed in the details. It turns out that at this firm, the construction logistics wouldn’t be handled by Leigh anyway, so he’s not missing out like he initially thought. He chooses all of the most environmentally friendly options, even though going the other way might be a specific fuck you to Thanos. Tony draws the line at screwing up his own planet to spite a long-dead Titan.

He goes to a fancy restaurant with Branson Harriot that evening, and they have a great conversation about Stark Industries, Charriotte, and Branson’s family. The other man never had kids, is unashamedly grateful for that now, because he’s watched other people’s relationships get torn apart by the Snap. Losing a spouse to that event is one thing, Branson says, but getting divorced because you can’t take the grief of losing some of your kids? That’s worse, he tells Tony. He’s seen it happen. The country’s divorce rate is only now starting to stabilize after a huge spike, and Harriot says he thinks it has nowhere to go but down, thanks to the ‘soulmate thing.’

Tony’s been stuck in these conversations before, knows the only way out is through, so he sits there and listens as Harriot tells him that he had never forgotten the first thing his wife said to him when they met. When the awful day was over and they’d both survived it, he’d found those words on his hand, written like an arrow straight across his palm. He shows Tony.

_ This guy? You have got to be kidding me! _

Branson finds it deeply amusing that his response was chivalry.  _ “‘I beg your pardon, madame.’ _ She never lived it down, and now it’s written on her knee!” he says, wheezing.

Unfortunately, this is one of the most accepted subjects for small talk, nowadays. Tony is grateful for his eccentricities, which he can fall back on when asked about his own Words. Sometimes he claims he doesn’t have any. One time, he told the absolute truth, and the stranger had laughed like it was the most hilarious thing he’d ever heard. What he  _ doesn’t _ say, what he knows he absolutely should not say, is that Thanos’s supposed ‘gift’ is a panacea, a placebo, a fix it with no heft, a fake, a lie.

He’s met Thanos. He’s a murderer at a scale hitherto undreamt of, to quote a long-dead colleague. There’s no mercy, there’s no grace, there’s just camouflaged cruelty. But no one wants to hear that at dinner.

“So, Tony, what are yours? Have you found her? Him?”

Tony likes Branson, so he spreads out his hands in the universal sign of ‘what can you do?’ and says, “Branson, I’m Tony Stark. What do  _ you _ think my Words say?”

Branson chuckles. “That’s a good question. I’m torn between sex kitten and frigid scorn, honestly.”

“I mean, who isn’t?” Tony laughs.

The subject changes, and Tony rests a hand in his lap as if he can block out the Soulmark’s line of sight, under the table. Eventually, his hand relaxes, and he forgets why he’d put it there in the first place.

8888888888

The next day, he’s at Charriotte only to wrap up. The paperwork is finished by 9 AM, and Tony goes to say goodbye to Branson at his office. He’s just about to get up and leave when the door opens and he hears a woman’s voice.

“Branson, honestly, you could have told me!”

Tony turns and it’s Leigh. He’d never heard her voice before, but now that he has, he can’t believe he didn’t recognize it right away. It’s warm, vibrant, and his strong positive reaction to it has to be showing on his face, because she literally jumps in surprise to see that it’s him. 

“Ah yes, I don’t suppose I need to introduce you two,” Branson says, getting up and walking around his desk. Tony goes to stand, but Leigh widens her eyes at him as Branson’s back is turned, making a ‘sit’ gesture. Then, she pulls Branson over to the corner and starts speaking in a low whisper that he can’t hear. Leigh’s faced away from him, so he just looks at her, taking in the powder blue suit jacket and short, pleated chiffon skirt in the same color. It’s right on the edge of professional office wear, and Tony thinks with a pang that she’d probably have to conform more if it hadn’t been for the Snap.

Her hair, as always, is bound up in an 18th century masterpiece on her head, and Tony thinks he can see  _ dragonfly pins _ embedded in it.

Tony wants to take her home and introduce her to Rhodey and say, triumphantly,  _ See! I don’t need a soulmate! _

Instead, he sits and waits impatiently, counting dragonflies (three) until she and Branson walk back to his desk. Tony stands up, and when she turns around, he smiles as gently as possible at her. She looks apologetic, starts to walk past, then seems to realize she hadn’t really acknowledged him except to order him to sit, earlier. Leigh reaches out, squeezes his arm, and walks out without having said a word.

“She took Frank’s death a little hard, I think,” Branson says. “So did you make a date for breaking ground?”

“Ironically, I think I need to talk to her about it,” Tony says, turning back around to look behind him at the door Leigh left through. 

Branson’s smile is strained. “Well, maybe stick to email for a while yet. I think early July ought to be fine for us, schedule-wise. I can mention it to her, if you like?”

“Of course,” Tony says, wondering what’s going on. He remembers her email and wonders if she’s lost for something to make her feel grounded, this month. Would it be too presumptuous of him, he wonders, if he suggested she do something Frank would have enjoyed? “It’s been a pleasure,” he says, reaching out to shake Harriot’s hand.

“Likewise, Stark.”

On his way out, Tony looks around, ostensibly searching for the bathroom. He walks past an unoccupied office with lace curtains and stops, bemused. Peeking in for just a second, he notes that there is a plant stand beside her desk with a spider plant dangling from it, and on the desk is a pot of violets. Her desk itself has one of those glass plates that lay across papers or calendars or whatnot, but of course, Leigh’s is full of variously-sized white lace doilies and pressed flowers.

Tony wonders if anyone thinks of his workspace as that dedicated to a theme, and then thinks about what it’s looked like over the years, and nods. Yes, yes they would.

8888888888

> TO: FLBalci
> 
> FROM: Mechanic270
> 
> SUBJECT: That was weird, right?
> 
> Hey,
> 
> I’m thinking maybe I should have warned you that Branson called me to come down and do the site paperwork. Sorry.
> 
> Tony

  
  


> TO: Mechanic270
> 
> FROM: FLBalci
> 
> SUBJECT: Re: That was weird, right?
> 
> Greetings from aforementioned tiny apartment,
> 
> Full disclosure: I was not prepared to see you that day in the office. I don’t really have an explanation, except for the fact that I’d been pretty emotionally ripped up the week before, enough to take time off, and I’d poured my soul out entirely accidentally in that email. I had compartmentalized you into the ‘emotional’ column, I guess, and seeing you at work just threw me.
> 
> I’m sorry,
> 
> Leigh

He tells himself not to read anything into the fact that Leigh has put him into the ‘not work’ column, but it’s a losing battle. Tony decides that his goal for groundbreaking day is that Leigh Balci is going to speak to him for the first time since he met her. It’s an odd situation, an odd goal, all things considered, so he keeps it to himself. No need to jinx it.

8888888888

They set the date for the start of construction for Monday, July 1st. Because he’s got some things he wants to leave at the site, Tony rents a van, loads it up, and drives down from NYC. It’s a seven hour drive and the groundbreaking is at 8 AM, so he does the ridiculous and naps from 7 PM the night before until 11 PM and drives straight through. Tony doesn’t want the rented van to be in the way, so he parks it off to the side, away from where all of the construction vehicles are staging.

He gets out, uses the portapotty with gratitude, and looks around for Leigh. It’s an unseasonably chilly morning for July, 55 fahrenheit, and everywhere he looks are flannel shirts, like some kind of cliche. Everyone’s wearing hard hats, and he snags one from a line of them near a table with blueprints held down by rocks. Tony wonders if Leigh’s hard hat will have lace on it, or stenciled flowers. He wouldn’t put it past her-- she’s dedicated to her aesthetic, and it really works.

Tony walks up to the guy wearing the different colored hard hat and they talk about the project for a while as others gather around them, some of them taking out their cell phones to snap pictures. He doesn’t mind, he’s used to it. The ceremony starts up, low-key but still exciting enough for him because of the project itself, and for a lot of the workers because he’s still Iron Man. Tony’s wearing the ARC reactor under his shirt, and he undoes enough buttons to show them its glow.

The foreman gets the whole thing in motion now that the ceremonial stuff is through, but he catches Tony’s eye, letting him know he’d like to talk some more at some point. Tony nods, and starts back toward the van, so he can show the guy the supplies he’s talking about, and figure out a good place to store them. He almost walks right over Leigh on the way, mostly because she’s wearing oversized tan overalls, a jacket from the same material, and a long braid. He didn’t recognize her in the hard hat and construction clothes.

“Hey, good to see you,” Tony says, meaning it.

Leigh’s brown eyes are large and startled, and then, for some reason, sad. She makes a frustrated face and just… scatters. It’s not running away, but that might be semantics. Tony remembers his goal for today, and half wonders if she  _ knows _ about it and is thwarting him. But no, she’d looked unhappy, and he’s very confused.

Tony grits his teeth and heads to the van, setting things up the way he’d planned to, and then he grabs his own StarkPad and stylus, scribbling an angry-but-legible message to hold up.

Then, his jaw set in determination, Tony stands in Leigh’s line of sight and holds his tablet with a flat hand on either side. It’s obvious, and the message is clear. She’s not going to be able to ignore him without the attention of the entire worksite.

**I need to speak with you, Miss Balci. ASAP.**

The man she’s going over supplies with points over at Tony, and he can see her reading it. Leigh’s eyes fly up to meet his, and she looks nervous. If it hadn’t been for the fact that he’s known her for nearly three months now and  _ she hasn’t spoken a word to him yet, _ he would take pity on her for that look alone. But not today. This strangeness stops now.

She shakes her head ‘no,’ and something inside Tony snaps. He starts toward her, setting the tablet down on the table.

“I need her,” Tony says, reaching out and grabbing Leigh’s wrist to drag her along behind him. He leads her toward the cluster of bushes where he saw her for the first time and past them; twenty feet, thirty feet. The point is to get them out of earshot of all of her subordinates so he can properly express his frustration without diminishing her authority.

When he stops walking, he turns around and sees that she’s lost her hard hat somewhere. “I didn’t drag you too fast, did I?” he asks, frowning.

Leigh shakes her head, rubbing at her wrist.

“All right. What is going on?” he barks, sucking in a deep breath and holding out a hand in a slight apology. She’s a grown woman, he doesn’t need to holler at her. “You recognize this is aberrant behavior, right? Not speaking to a client is one thing, but I’d like to think we’re friends. So what is it?”

Her eyes are screwed shut, her hands held at chest level, palm out, fingers spread.

“Is it Iron Man? You swore an oath on the life of your family, or something?” he snaps. It’s cruel, he’s always had a vindictive temper.

Fire sparks in her eyes, and Leigh takes a huge breath, her mouth twisting in anger. She takes two steps so she’s standing right in front of him, her hands in fists at her sides. “Maybe it was too much to expect that you could save the world, but you didn’t stop there, no, you had to take away all my hopes and dreams too!”

Then, she turns on her heel and stalks away.

  
  



	4. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leigh’s left hand seeks out her right wrist, messes with it, pulling away a scrap of skin-colored fabric. She holds that arm up beside her face. He sees that there’s a square of dirt-ringed adhesive around a single, black inked word in his handwriting. The skin around the word is lighter, as if it never sees the sun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So in my defense with posting chapters quickly, that last one was a hefty cliffhanger, am I right?
> 
> I have to laugh, because this chapter *feels* like it’s seven thousand words long, to me, but it’s just over 4500. It's a roller coaster of emotional intensity, that's for sure.

### Chapter Four

Tony stumbles back in utter, mind numbing shock. Nothing about the world around him has changed, but none of it will ever be the same, either.

Leigh, his-- his _soulmate,_ is walking away from him.

He starts after her. She must have heard his running steps, because she picks up her pace. Tony’s heartbeat roars in his ears. If he doesn’t stop her now, she’ll make sure he never gets a chance to come near her again. This had to have been building since she lowered the gun, all those weeks ago.

Tony catches up, grabs her in his arms from behind, and in a burst of clarity he knows what he has to do. He needs _time,_ time to persuade her, time to understand.

“FRIDAY, activate bunker protocol!” he says, knowing she’s always listening through the receiver he built into his ARC reactor. His AI is silent, but Tony knows what she would be saying, so he adds, “Do it.”

Leigh’s not struggling, but she’s trembling, and Tony holds on with desperation, because if this works, she’ll be in real danger if she breaks free of him right now.

He can hear a shout go up among the workers, even over the sounds of the backhoe, and suddenly, a large metal rectangle slams itself into the ground beside them. Leigh’s reaction is to scream and shrink back against him, and he turns her unresisting body around, pulling her head against his chest. Three more slabs bury themselves in the soft mud around them, followed by the loud boom sound of the ceiling piece landing exactly as it was meant to. A sizzling hiss echoes in the newly dark space, chased by a red glow. The bunker protocol worked exactly as intended-- he and Leigh are now inside a powerfully sturdy box anchored into the ground and self-welded into an impregnable fortress.

The built-in lights flicker on as soon as the red glow from the welds start fading.

Tony opens his arms and backs away from Leigh. He’s bought himself the time, but he’s probably squandered at _least_ half of it by trapping her inside this thing with him. If she were any other woman, if he didn’t have her first voiced Words to him written on his skin, he would never have dared to do this.

For the first time, he realizes she’s marked, too. He’s spoken to her freely multiple times.

 _“What?”_ Leigh finally asks in a frightened gasp, her arms tight around her torso, eyes wide as she looks around her.

Tony’s shot through with five kinds of desperation, and he’s burning through all of them, chasing hope. “Bunker protocol. Self-building survival space.” He shakes his head, looking her right in the eyes. “I didn’t know what else to do. _Leigh.”_

She shakes her head, scared and defensive. “Open the door.”

He winces. “There’s no door.”

Leigh stares at him.

“It’s designed for last-minute protection. I brought it to set up for an emergency in the future, sometime. Not this, this was…” he scrubs a hand over his face. “It’s set to release electromagnetic resistance after forty-eight hours.”

“Two _days?”_ she gasps.

Tony backs up and slumps against the wall behind him. All of the walls are covered by a metal sheath to protect the goods and tools buried inside each slab. “There’s food, water. Stuff to do other than argue with me,” he says, offering her the barest hint of a smile.

“What… what if there was an earthquake--”

“This is West Virginia.”

“A flood, what if we _had_ to get out?”

“FRIDAY, you’re configured for rescue, right? We aren’t set up for death by lahar or something, in here?”

_“You’re as safe as you can be after what you just did, Boss. Yes, is the answer.”_

“That’s--” Leigh starts to say, looking for the speaker, and he finishes for her.

“My AI assistant, yeah. You’re safe.” Outrage crosses her face, and he recognizes it, but speaks up right away to refute it. “You don’t want to be stuck here, you don’t want to talk to me. I get it. But. There was only so long you could put that off.”

Immediately, she’s defensive again, pulling the thick braid over her shoulder, crossing her arms. Tony widens his eyes expectantly, and Leigh’s left hand seeks out her right wrist, messes with it, pulling away a scrap of skin-colored fabric. She holds that arm up beside her face. He sees that there’s a square of dirt-ringed adhesive around a single, black inked word in his handwriting. The skin around the word is lighter, as if it never sees the sun.

_Tony._

It makes his heart sing, which is ridiculous, it’s preposterous, it is everything he’s pushed against, everything he thought was bullshit. Thanos’s tainted, terrible _gift,_ right there in the flesh in front of him, and he _wants_ her.

“I think if I tried to show you mine, you’d never speak to me again, and we were _just_ making progress on that,” Tony says wryly. “They’re on my thigh,” he explains. Leigh looks down, regret painted across her features, and he’s only human, and those words had _hurt,_ so he adds, “Yeah. That was my introduction to the whole concept.”

He lets out a breath, turns, and walks a little ways into the other half of the bunker. Another light flickers on. Tony wants to explain just how horrible those words were, how he’d seen them marked on his skin at the worst possible time. That hearing them _now_ hadn’t stabbed him quite as much as they did on that day in his shower, but only barely. The time in between has lessened their weight a little, but only because he’s lived with them for over a year.

Something about that thought stops him in his tracks. _Lived with the words._

Tony spins around. “You planned that out, didn’t you? Since how long ago?”

“Can it be warmer in here?” Leigh asks in a small voice.

“Yes.” 

Tony starts looking at the numbers on the metal sheathing, and finds the right one. He rolls it up sideways to access the packed supplies. The battery powered device has a thermostat, but he frowns and sets it down, looking for a different panel. “One sec, we can--” Tony breaks off and strides across the space to the opposite wall, peeling back its sheathing. The carpet he’s looking for was specially designed, with a thermoreflective layer embedded in it that will prevent heat loss through the ground. “Come here?”

“Is that a _rug?”_ Leigh asks.

“Yep, and it’ll roll out, if you’re not in the way.”

She walks over and presses against the wall, and he unfurls the rug. Both of them lean down almost in unison to adjust it. Another minute and the space heater is on and pumping out the heat.

“There are chairs, but--” Tony breaks off.

“But you prefer me to be in the hot seat right now, instead?” Her lips curve into a self-deprecating smile, and she starts fiddling with her braid. He takes these indicators as positive, but only inwardly. Outwardly, Tony is implacable.

“How long ago did you start practicing what you were going to say?”

She holds his gaze bravely. “Months.”

“You still mean them?”

Leigh _catches fire._ There’s no other description for the way she shifts from confused and uncomfortable to furious. _“Yes_ I still mean them! You, you--” She throws her hands in the air. “That word on my wrist was the only thing I had left. I stood in a _house full of dust_ , that day, and then there it was. Like a lifeline. Like someone was saying, ‘okay, so you’ve lost them, but this, _this is for you._ This will make it better!’” Her eyes are bright with unshed tears and anger, and everything she’s saying slices him to the bone.

“It’s a parlor trick,” he whispers. “Worse than a consolation prize. It’s bullshit, it-- It doesn’t mean anything.” The familiar words taste like wax in his mouth now, slippery and hard to scrape away.

Leigh fixes him with a _look._ Tony can’t take it, he turns his head.

“You clearly don’t believe that,” she adds, twisting the knife.

How did he trap her in this enclosed space only for him to be the one exposed?

“Yeah, well, I’m about--” he checks his watch. “Fifteen minutes in, so it’s a new thing for me.” Tony swings his gaze back to her, feeling the aggression settle into the set of his jaw.

“I’ve watched the people around me transformed by joy, with their soulmates,” she says, slowly unraveling her braid, combing her fingers through the loose, wavy strands as they untwist. “I laid in bed the night you first signed your name to that email and _hoped.”_

“You put the gun down when you saw who it was, that’s something.”

“I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Yes you did.” The bitter words spill forth before he can stop them.

Leigh’s braid is half unraveled, the cascade of honey-gold hair spread across her chest like a breastplate. Tony thinks it’s ironic that this is the first time he’s ever seen her dressed like someone else, her unique style stifled by the thick tan overalls and coat.

Suddenly he doesn’t want to hear how she crafted those words, the ones that bookended the past year in such opposing ways. Tony goes back to the wall he pulled the rug out of and finds the camp chairs, pulls one out and walks into the middle of the room. He sets the base of the thin package it’s crammed into on the rug halfway between them, then shoves the top so it swings over to her, turning and walking away instead of watching her reaction. Then he grabs one for himself, opens it up right there next to the wall, and sits.

Leigh has a choice. She can place her chair wherever she wants, in whichever configuration, and both of them are smart enough to know that what she picks will matter to him. Tony watches her pick it up and loves the cascade of her golden hair that spills down when she leans over. To his surprise, though, she walks straight ahead and leans the chair up against the wall. She then trails her hand along the metal sheath of that wall, moving toward the one opposite him. Leigh touches each pocket and indent, cataloguing what’s there, until she apparently finds what she was looking for right in the center.

He watches her read the instructions, then pull out the tripod of tubing. It’s a lightweight contraption for hanging wet clothes to dry next to the space heater. Leigh takes off her heavyweight jacket and hangs it on the hook before starting on the metal buckles at her shoulders. Tony can’t tear his eyes away, but after his confession to seeing her silhouette camping, he knows she wouldn’t be doing this if she weren’t comfortable enough. She’d been wearing a white blouse under the jacket, and he catches a glimpse of something yellow as she steps out of the overalls.

Tony wants to laugh when she’s done hanging those up. She’s wearing some kind of _tapestry_ skirt. It reaches down to her ankles, with enough fabric that she’d been easily able to wear the baggy overalls over it. The skirt’s patterned all over like some kind of rich persian rug. It’s as if Leigh was a nesting doll hiding all of her beauty under her work clothes, and it’s endearing as fuck. Tony’s so distracted by this that he doesn’t see that she’s walking over until she unfolds her camp chair just a few feet away from him.

“A dialogue box popped up just now, asking if you’re sure,” he jokes.

“I’d hit ‘okay,’ on it,” she says.

“You know what you’re doing, you’re saying,” Tony says, impressed and attracted by her audacity.

“Not at all,” she smiles.

The lilting voice of his AI sounds in the space. _“Boss, the foreman wants to know if you’re all right.”_

“Definitely. We both just needed a break, that’s all. Testing out a new product for Stark Industries. We’ve caught a weird pathogen from the lake and are quarantining. I hit the wrong button, whoops. Whatever you need to say, FRIDAY, you got it?”

_“Got it.”_

“Tony!” Leigh objects, laughing.

“Say it again,” he tells her urgently. The light in her eyes fades a bit, and she slides her legs up underneath her in the chair, a compact, protective posture. “What, too far? It’s written on your arm!” he protests, only half kidding.

“You want me to say mine again?” Leigh offers. It’s pretty incisive commentary, all things considered, but he has a counter to it.

“Well, with all the time you spent practicing them, I suppose it’s only fair.”

“You could have figured it out,” Leigh says. “You know that, right? Day one, camping.”

Tony looks at her like she’s crazy, and she reaches out and grabs his hand, places her right wrist on his palm, and closes his fingers around it. He’s distracted by the sizzle of contact, _willing_ contact, at that.

 _“Look_ at it,” she orders him.

He does. Tony smooths his thumb across his name, and then finally, reason breaks through. _It’s in his handwriting._

She can tell it has hit him. “From that first day, I was writing. Over and over.”

“You got lucky. My writing is not always this neat,” Tony tells her. She puffs out a frustrated breath, but he presses on, dropping the joking tone. “You think I looked at those awful words more than once?”

“You did.”

Tony looks down at her hand in his, his name on her skin, and he wishes so badly that everything would be different, but it’s not. She reacts to his expression by pulling her hand back, and he stands up and walks away from her.

“You’re right, I did. And you put them there. Not the way most people do, no,” he chuckles darkly. “No. Not a surprised response but _calculation._ You meant to hurt me, after you know who I was, and what I was to you.”

“You said soulmates are a bullshit gift from a tyrant!” Leigh says, angry. “So don’t start with the--”

Tony’s heart is ratcheted open, and everything spills out of it. “That was before I met this gorgeous woman that wasn’t connected to that!” he shouts at her, turning around. “That was before I started thinking about what my life might be like with her in it!”

“What?” Leigh gasps, getting up, clutching the back of the chair.

“You think this is about the Words? _Leigh!_ You were not what I expected when I offered to camp out. I left the property that day with a hell of a crush,” Tony tells her truthfully. “After another month of emails I was composing a speech to my best friend about how I’d triumphed over the whole _concept_ of soulmates. I’d found someone by myself, I didn’t need Thanos’s tainted fucking gift.”

Leigh’s standing in the corner of the bunker with a hand laid flat on her stomach as if trying to steady herself.

“You spent that time knowing you’d found your soulmate. I spent that time being proud that I’d proved I didn’t need one. Which one of us was more wrong?” Tony asks her.

“Neither,” she whispers, dragging her chair over to where she’s standing. She turns it around and sits, working on her braid, steadily unraveling it. Her hands are trembling.

Tony slides down the wall and just watches her. _Neither,_ she’d said.

They sit in silence for a long time. 

“You’re thinking so hard I can barely breathe in here, Stark,” Leigh finally calls out in a warm, amused voice.

“You have to admit this is quite a situation.”

“You, the hero who wants to reject absolutely everything Thanos did, and me, the victim whose family you couldn’t save? Yeah, we’re an afternoon special waiting to happen,” Leigh says. She stands up and leans over a little, shaking her head as the mass of hair she unbraided cascades down, all the way past her hips. After a few passes through it with her fingers, she starts to gather it up.

“Don’t,” Tony begs, the word torn out of him.

Leigh straightens and leans her head sideways, looking at him. “Why?”

He suspects she won’t respond all that favorably to, ‘because you look like a wood nymph I’d like to be turned into a frog for the crime of trying to seduce.’ He goes for flippant, instead.

“Well, you know what used to be my day job. It’s real easy to defeat a hero with hair like that. Totally against regulation. Makes me feel safe when you have it down. It means we’re not in danger.”

“So, you’re saying you like my hair. You like looking at it,” Leigh says lightly, sitting down in her now-turned-towards-him-again-thank-god camp chair.

Tony twists his lips sideways, trying to prevent the grin that wants to spill forth. If he liked her before, when she didn’t say a word to him, now that she might be _flirting,_ he’s a complete goner.

“I mean, it’s _okay,”_ he manages. “Might be prettier if you tossed, I don’t know, three dragonfly pins into it.”

“You _counted_ them?” Leigh asks. Her cheeks are pink.

“Yes. I did not count the number of doilies you had at your desk, though, so we’re talking, _bare minimum_ of paying attention.”

“Because I totally showed you my office.”

“It’s _right_ next to the bathroom,” Tony protests. His cheeks hurt from the effort of _not_ smiling.

“It’s not,” Leigh says. 

“It will be if I pay them to remodel the building,” he tells her.

“Suit yourself,” she says, her eyes lighting up as she realizes it’s somewhat of a pun when said to Iron Man. Leigh leans back in her chair with a smug demeanor he completely recognizes, because it’s one of his favorites to use himself. But she leaves her hair down, and that’s a big step in the right direction.

8888888888

They both get hungry at the same time and raid the walls for lunch supplies. He’d spared no expense for the best of the so-called ‘prepper’ foods, things that would last for years stored up until needed in an emergency. Tony makes the mistake of letting slip that he stocked the bunker less than two weeks before, so technically, he could have had all manner of foods in there for them, if only he’d known. 

When they’re done, the table is set up in the middle of the bunker area, their finished meals wait to be added to the deluxe garbage compactor, and Tony’s shuffling the deck of cards he’d fished out of the wall.

“So, it’s been a few hours,” Leigh says in a careful voice from her position across the table from him. “I can’t help but think if this were any other situation, you’d have laid out all of the supplies from the walls in this thing and started using them to make an escape plan.”

Tony had been wondering and worrying about Leigh’s swift acquiescence to their captivity, and now he realizes that she has a broad pragmatic streak. She isn’t resigned to their circumstances at all. Incongruously, this pleases him. For most of his life, women have subsumed their wants and desires in an attempt to trade them for proximity to him. It looks like Leigh might have set hers aside to observe how best to persuade him to let her go.

Her choice would even be encouraging if it weren’t for the fact that it makes him feel just a bit like a serial killer with a _torture bunker._

“The design for this was about external forces, not internal ones,” Tony says. He thinks about how impossible it would have been to try to protect all of the New Yorkers who died in the Chitauri attack, back when _that_ was the most incomprehensible and devastating thing that could have happened on Earth. “48 hours to strategize, to survive, to coordinate, without having to worry about fighting something off in the process.” Tony leans forward, hoping she’ll see the truth in what he’s saying.

“How long ago did you design it? You said you stocked it less than two weeks ago.”

“Why?”

“Is it possible you rushed this? When have you been in an emergency and chosen to take two days to decide what to do about it?”

Leigh’s studiously reasonable tone sets Tony’s teeth on edge, as if he has a Pavlovian response to being managed. Unfortunately, she’s right.

He’s not willing to concede that, though. “I’m in a different place in my life, now. Consultant, not contractor.”

“After years of watching footage of Iron Man, I’d buy that argument more if you’d framed this like a pause button for your first instincts,” Leigh says thoughtfully, “But you’ve called it a ‘survival’ bunker multiple times, now. Survival, not strategy.”

“It’s a prototype,” Tony whispers, but that’s dandelion fluff in a hurricane. Leigh’s face twists, she looks down, and with a kind of detached horror, Tony wonders what _his_ looks like to make her react like she’s done something wrong. Nothing springs to mind, so he just watches the play of her emotions. Finally, she smiles, and it’s an upside-down version of what he knows her smile can look like.

“Well. Of all the people in the world, you deserve some extra benefit of the doubt.”

Tony’s seen that kind of nobility before. He’d always wanted to be the kind of person who engenders it in others, but this is not at all what he’d had in mind.

“I wasn’t thinking,” he blurts out. “It was selfish.”

Now her smile is genuine, but what she says after it cuts just as deeply. “You deserve to be selfish, too.” Leigh gets up and tidies away the packages from lunch into the trash compactor, while Tony has a mini crisis.

_“But you’ve called it a ‘survival’ bunker multiple times, now. Survival, not strategy.”_

The bunker was one of the first projects Tony had designed in a long time that was prompted by _his_ concerns, not saving the world, saving his city, saving his team, or saving a person very important to him. He hadn’t seen its glaring flaws after spending five weeks perfecting it, but Leigh had spotted them in less than a day.

8888888888

After he shakes off his Leigh-prompted introspection, they play cards for hours. Leigh is clever, and Tony, who is used to wiping the floor with his opponents, starts to enjoy the surprise of not being able to. He starts to suspect that her suggestion of darning socks for the Avengers if they ever figure out how to reverse the Snap would be a waste of her mind. They’ve been chatting the whole time, avoiding any hot-button topics, but after a comment about how many partial music albums were released in the past year posthumously, Leigh grows quiet.

After ten minutes of silence, she sets her cards down. “I’m not going to kiss you in here,” she says.

“Controversial decision. My polling says that 50% of the bunker disagrees with that stance, ” Tony tells her. Her lips twitch but she schools her expression back to a serious one.

“You locked me in here with you--”

“--to get you not to drop off of the face of the Earth, from my perspective. Which I’m still not 100% confident you won’t do, I might add,” Tony objects.

“...really?” Leigh asks, and her complete surprise makes him realize that he’s an _asshole,_ that there could be a whole bunch of physical expectations regarding soulmates and he would have no idea.

“You should know that I have done zero research on the soulmate thing. Twenty minutes after finding out, I told the nurse, ‘don’t tell me IF I have Words, don’t tell me what they are, and keep them off the chart.’ I went home after they released me, got drunk, took a shower, found the words, and then proceeded to pretend that the whole phenomenon didn’t exist,” Tony tells her, all at once, hands gesturing like crazy. “So I don’t know any… protocols. Or physical expectations.”

Leigh holds up a hand, her face creased with concern. “Rewind a bit,” she says. “You were in the hospital?”

Tony doesn’t want to do this, but out of anyone on Earth, Leigh deserves not to hear him deflect over this part of his life. “I was on Thanos’s planet when he Snapped. When we failed to stop him from taking a component he needed, he left to get the last one, back here. The ship we took to get there was trashed, it stalled out lightyears from home. I almost starved to death.”

The expression on her face is inscrutable, but her eyes are sober and sad. Finally, Leigh reaches out and touches his arm with the hand marked with his name.

“Thank you for trying.”

“Yeah, well after he dropped the moon on my head, it was personal.” Tony sighs, looking up and rubbing the space between his eyes. He’s getting tired and careless after being up for 18 hours straight with no caffeine. Leigh’s hand on his arm squeezes tight, then tighter, and he finally looks at her. Her face is ashen.

“You’re not kidding?” she whispers.

Tony realizes what he has to do, and so he takes a deep breath and tries to turn toward her in his chair, but it’s a _camp chair,_ and they don’t do that. So he stands up and kicks it out of the way, crouching in front of her. Leigh’s still staring at him in shock, and she doesn’t know the half of it. He takes both of her hands.

“Hey. We failed, but it was _close._ So close, Leigh.” He isn’t going to tell her about what Strange did, and how he was wrong to do it. Tony has litigated that in his own head for months, and it still doesn’t sit well. “Thanos knew my name. Told me--” Tony can’t say it. He shakes his head. “If we could have won, we would have.”

Strange’s prediction, about the _one_ timeline they came out on top, tantalizes him again, but he shakes it off.

Leigh’s brown eyes are fond and warm, now. “All that-- that wasn’t in the news.”

“It doesn’t help much, does it?” Tony said.

Leigh smoothes her thumbs across his hands where he’s still holding onto her. “It helps me, right now, in this place.”

He wants to kiss her, but he wants to keep her afterwards, so Tony swallows hard and tells her, “Good.”


	5. Chapter Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You wanted your soulmate to make custom doorstops for your clients, admit it,” Tony tells her, painfully aware of how much he does not fit the picture she’d painted for him.
> 
> “Tony!”
> 
> “I want to punch that guy and he doesn’t even exist,” he continues, watching her. “So what terrible scenario were you re-picturing, when it turned out to be me?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Tony and Leigh play chicken with each other for a whole chapter and we get to watch in delight' was my other option for a description.
> 
> [[This is going to be much longer than Iron Helix, so I'm going to give myself permission to post chapters as quickly as I like, while the story tries to eat me alive before I get it all written out, haha. Enjoy!]]

###  Chapter Five

“So…” Tony starts, making a face as he looks at the air mattresses he included in the bunker gear. “Are you a night owl, by any chance?”

Leigh is playing Solitaire on the table, and she doesn’t even look up as she asks, “Did you only include one cot or air mattress, or did one of the two you did put in turn out to be faulty?”

“What are you, clairvoyant?” Tony says.

“How much sleep did you get at the hotel last night?” Leigh asks, still not looking up.

“I didn’t.”

“You drove straight through? Set it up and sleep first then, solved.”

“I don’t know why you even need a mattress. You can just sleep on all that hair,” Tony teases, putting away some of the extra things he’d pulled out of the walls in search of the mattresses. Then, he pictures himself lying in a sea of her hair. “In fact, why don’t I just--” he starts to say, but Leigh cuts him off.

“No.”

“So did we skip the honeymoon period and I missed it? Just jumped over all my favorite parts, to end up here in ‘say no to Tony’ land?”

“That’s amusing, considering this whole situation is one step up from you clubbing me in the head and dragging me to your cave, wouldn’t you say?” she says, finally looking over at him.

Tony scratches the side of his head, trying to think of a comeback. “Yeah, okay,” he finally concedes.

“I’m just saying, I could press kidnapping charges on you.”

“Please do not.”

Their banter is slowly but surely paving over some holes he didn’t know he had in his chest. Tony starts to inflate the air mattress with the foot pump. Halfway through, she leans her head back and starts to gather her hair up again, and he’s mesmerized. After a few minutes of watching her, he sees Leigh’s hands freeze, and she turns her head to look at him.

“You let all the air back out,” she tells him.

“Got distracted,” Tony admits. When she looks puzzled, he goes a bit further. “I have a Thing.”

“A ‘thing?’” She doesn’t capitalize, but uses air quotes, instead.

“About your hair.”

Leigh gets up, and gives him a serious once-over. “You are about to hit the wall, I think. Go sit down.”

“Leigh, I’m  _ Iron Man. _ You think I can’t be sleepy and use a foot pump?” He wants to impress her, so he says, “I once stayed up for seventy-two hours and tested subcutaneous chips to remotely call my suit.”

Leigh walks around behind him and he moves out of her way so she can stand by the wall where he’d been. “How did that go, in the end?” she asks, starting up the foot pump. She starts absently pulling handfuls of her hair from the base of her neck and dropping them. They ripple when they fall and there’s a scent he can’t quite place, spicy and tantalizing.

Tony tells her about the Mark 42, how he designed it so that it could come for him if he ever hits terminal velocity again. Her eyes go wide, but she doesn’t ask him if that happens often, like he would have expected.

“There,” Leigh says, interrupting him in the middle of his explanation as to why he ended up in Rose Hill. “Are there sheets?”

Tony looks down at the mattress, which is now fully inflated. Leigh has the pump in her hand and she’s looking for the nook it came out of.

“You’re  _ handling _ me,” Tony says in a kind of delighted outrage.

“This is more self defense. I’m planning to try and bust out of here once you’re asleep.” She finds the sheet and expertly installs it.

“You can’t,” Tony says, falling 15% more in love with her as she throws the blanket she’s found straight at his head. “Really. I tested it, couldn’t get through even with most of my suit tools.” 

“That’s why I said ‘try,’” she tells him maternally. “Sleep.” As if punishing him for not listening to her, she pulls out a clip from a pocket in the tan jacket and cages her hair at her neck in it, twisting it first so he can’t even enjoy watching the ponytail ends.

Tony lays down, and it’s a measure of how tired he is that the inflated bump that counts as the ‘built in pillow’ isn’t even that uncomfortable. He looks over at Leigh, who has picked up the deck of cards and seems to be counting them.

“There’s one on the rug under the table,” he tells her. “Why are you so calm all of a sudden? Is this Stockholm Syndrome? Radical Soulmate Acceptance? Are you planning to knock me out once I’m snoring?”

She looks down at her hands, and again he notes how lovely she is. Tony knows that the ‘no makeup’ look does actually involve a lot of makeup and subtlety, but he can see her freckles. There’s something about her that’s just inherently beautiful, he thinks. 

Leigh’s biting her lip and looking over now, and his stomach sinks, waiting for whatever bombshell she’s about to drop on him. He’d screwed up, allowed himself to feel too comfortable with the fact that she’s absolutely right, he kidnapped her and confined her in this bunker with him. Soulmate or not, by all rights she should be furious.

“You aren’t going to like it,” Leigh says. Tony sits up. Something in her tone chases away the sleepiness. “I mean, I hope I can explain it in a way that doesn’t sound... “ She sighs. “What’s that thing that happens when you’re, what did that monster Loki call it? ‘Burdened with beautiful purpose’ or something, from the video in Germany? The implication being that you’re the one called to do something important that no one else can do.”

It was worse than she had implied. “Being my soulmate is like being a-- It’s a terrible responsibility, to you?”

“No, it’s a privilege, Tony. But those aren’t always things the person chooses for themselves, that’s all I’m saying.”

Her expression is so earnest, and the word  _ privilege _ strikes him like one of Thor’s lightning bolts, split into multiple arcs and hitting in a scattered field, all at once.

Leigh’s still talking, and he’s missed it trying to remember how to breathe. He struggles to his feet, one foot on the unstable air mattress.

“I shouldn't have said anything, you need your sleep,” she says, startled to her feet by his sudden movement. 

“I drove everyone else away,” he says, the blanket draped around his shoulders. The card deck is still in her hand, and her rich brown eyes are looking at him with the kind of dogged determination and sense of responsibility he remembers seeing in Pepper. He’ll be  _ damned _ if he will let another young woman tear themselves into pieces trying to keep him from flying apart. “That was on me, not you.”

“Had your name engraved on their skin, did they?” Leigh asks, lifting a golden eyebrow.

He strides toward her. “This isn’t what I wanted, this isn’t why I did this,” Tony flares, gesturing to the walls of the bunker.

“Then why did you?” Leigh asks, but her cheeks are flushed and she’s breathing heavily, pupils blown out.

She said she wouldn’t kiss him, and, damn it, he hasn’t respected her freedom, he doesn’t respect this opinion of hers, at the very least he could respect  _ that _ choice. Still, Tony crowds her against the wall. She’s looking up, her face tipped toward him, and he  _ wants. _

“I want your joy,” he whispers. “Not your sense of responsibility. This was never about soulmates. It might be the most normal way anything has ever started for me,” Tony confesses. Her hands creep away from her chest, where they’d been pressed, to  _ his _ chest, lightly. It feels good. “I met a woman, thought she was gorgeous, and I got to know her. The more I saw, the more I liked.” Leigh’s blushing, and he wants to feel the heat with his own cheek, his fingers, his lips. “Hearing those words from you shifted me that needed inch across the line into what’s acceptable, to stop you from running away.”

“Whose line is that?” she asks, her hands firming their press on his chest. Not to push away, but to soothe, and it does.

Tony allows himself a conceited smile. “Mine. My line. Why, you have a complaint?” He tucks his chin in to look down at her as sternly as he can manage.

“I think there might be some calibration issues,” Leigh says. He presses closer to her, notes the way her fingers curl a little into his shirt.

“Well. It  _ is _ set for billionaire.” Tony looks down at her and he isn’t even scared at how honest the look must be on his face for her to be staring back at him with her eyes wide like that. “Leigh.”

“Hmm?” 

The noise is almost fond, and it turns his lips up to hear it. “I want to kiss you.”

“I guess you shouldn’t have locked me up in your soulmate storage container then,” she says, her warm eyes dancing with amusement.

Tony takes a deep breath and carries on with what he’d planned to say, even though he’s not the type to lay himself bare like this. Maybe it’s all right with just one person, though. She  _ does _ wear his name on her skin. “Will you kiss me back?”

Leigh understands right away what he’s doing. Her head tips to the side, expression softening as she considers the question. Then, she leans forward just enough to press her lips against his chest. When Leigh comes away, she’s smiling, but it’s an impish one.

“You’ll find out in, what? Thirty-six hours?”

Tony groans and pulls back, twisting around so he can slump against the wall beside her. His chest burns from her lips. He could pick out exactly where she’d put them.

“You should sleep, I hear it makes time pass faster.”

“Like I could sleep  _ now,” _ he says.

Leigh laughs, and then says something strange. “Hey, look over at the other wall for a sec.”

“Why?”

She looks genuinely flustered. “Because I dropped the cards, and I am not a tease. Well, not a  _ mean _ tease,” Leigh tells him, pointing at the floor.

Tony looks down at the scattered cards. The implications of what she’s just said-- the fact that she completely understands that it would be cruel to sink down to her knees for any reason right now,  _ and _ the picture of her as a not-mean tease --has probably eradicated whatever percentage of Not In Love he was.

He looks away, but Tony sees her lower herself down anyway, in his mind’s eye.

8888888888

That night they sleep in shifts, which is actually nowhere near as fraught with possibilities as Tony had been hoping. The rubberized coating on the air mattress doesn’t even retain the sweet smell of her hair, he checked.

He does manage to get the Keurig working when she wakes up, so while it’s not campside French Press, it’s something. Tony loves the way Leigh nurses her cup like a kindred spirit.

_ “Got a development for you, Boss.” _

“Hit me,” Tony says, putting his foot up on Leigh’s camp chair. She’s sitting against the wall on the air mattress, draped in blankets and sipping her coffee.

_ “The press has started gathering.” _

“They think I’m missing, again?”

_ “At the lake, outside the bunker.” _

The other camp chair falls over with the strength of his jerk of surprise. “What? Outside right now?”

_ “The story they’re running with is that you’ve found your soulmate.” _

“I’m sorry,” Leigh says quietly.

Tony looks over at her, brows furrowed. “Why?”

“I am the one who chose to say them. I could have done it whenever.”

“Nah, I was ready to  _ make _ you talk to me, yesterday,” Tony tells her. Her eyebrows go up, but he turns his attention back to FRIDAY, getting up to pace. “Is there drone footage of our conversation? The bunker building itself? Or did someone just notice we were gone and jump to conclusions?”

_ “Seems to be the latter. Surveillance from D.C. and New York City shows there are press vans outside Miss Balci’s apartment building and the tower.” _

“What?” Leigh asks, gulping the last from her cup and rising to her feet, the blankets sliding free from her shoulders. “No, that’s-- I live on the first floor. The curtains don’t cover… oh, my God.”

“FRIDAY, we’d like to stay ignorant on whether there’s art of her apartment on the internet right now,” Tony says, crossing the room toward Leigh. She holds a hand out to keep him at bay, and he deserves it.

_ “You’ve got it.”  _

“Shit,” Tony says, realizing something. He pinches the bridge of his nose. “How many calls from Rhodey?”

_ “Five so far this morning, Boss.” _

“He is never going to let me live this down,” Tony groans. “I mean, yes, press infestation, very bad,” he adds, noting the way Leigh’s twisting her fingers in the ends of a lock of hair, anxious and upset.

“Rhodey?” Leigh asks.

“Best friend who listened to me rant about the uselessness of soulmates on multiple occasions. Likely prepared to make me eat crow for fifty lifetimes, after this.” Rhodey will probably do more than that. He’ll  _ love _ Leigh, all five feet seven inches of honeyed sass that she is. The two of them will likely ally against him, pick out Sith lightsabers, the whole nine yards. It’s really unfair, Tony thinks. Leigh’s  _ his, _ in soulmark if not in reality. She should be on his side.

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Leigh says, as if she can hear his thoughts. Tony feels his heart rate rise, lifts his eyebrows in the silent question. “You said that this--” she gestures to the bunker “--was more about keeping me from getting away than about the Words? Why can’t it still be that? Yours are hidden from view, and mine can be, too. I’ve worn a patch on my wrist for over a year.”

Tony shuts his eyes for a few seconds. There’s an unfamiliar jolt of possessiveness riding up from the deep recesses of his animal brain to surge forth in cave man triumph. Even before he knew who Leigh was,  _ his name was on her skin. _ Not just first words. His  _ name. _ As if to taunt him, an image of Thanos’s face as he drove the knife into Tony’s side comes unbidden to his mind.  _ Stark, _ he seems to be saying,  _ I’ll master you yet. Every time you’re pleased with her, it’s my gift you’re admiring. _

“Tony?”

He comes back to reality facing the wall, one hand flat against the plastic, head down, the other holding his side.  _ That _ side.

“What was that? You were far away.” Leigh’s voice is soothing, warm, comforting. He can tell she’s sincere, and a selfish, insidious part of him wants to take advantage, tell her he needs her help to forget the voice of the tyrant, her lips on his to banish the demons. Instead, he focuses on breathing, and in a few seconds, she touches the hand at his side gently, so gently.

“I’m fine,” he lies. “I will be fine,” the amended, true version. Tony lifts his head and looks over at Leigh. “Flashback? Embedded nightmare? Fever dream?” he suggests. Her hand leaves his side and slides soft across his forehead.

“You’re a little warm, but I think that’s due to your heart racing,” she tells him, her fingertips grazing his hairline before removing her hand. The path it took across his skin tingles. “You looked like you’d just been--”

“Stabbed?” he finishes for her, making a wry face.

“You’re never kidding. This is going to be my life now, finding out all the terrible things that happened to you in the course of regular conversation,” Leigh whispers hoarsely.

“I almost wish I could tell you that ‘the press is swarmed outside our impromptu soulmate dungeon’ is far from regular conversation around me, but…” Tony trails off. Leigh comes closer, rubs a warm hand along his arm, up his shoulder, down his back. It’s much-needed, this comfort, even if he has unfairly coaxed it from her. Tony’s never told anyone about that moment, the point where he fucked up and killed himself with his own blade, with Thanos at the other end of it. 

Thanos and Leigh are two of a very small number of entities that have touched him without permission, and isn’t that just a complete kick in the guts?

“Did you hear what I said before that?” Leigh asks.

“Tell me again?”

“Short version: it doesn’t have to be a soulmate dungeon. It could be a regular dungeon, instead. No one has to know.”

“You’re saying…” he wants to know exactly what she thinks she’s offering, here.

Leigh comes around to rest against the wall he’s standing in front of. “I’m saying to tell people that this situation came about organically. You wanted more time with me, you decided to be persuasive and I decided to be persuaded, instead of, you know, pressing charges.”

“You know you don’t get to decide that, right? The  _ DA _ decides that, and she doesn’t need your cooperation, so maybe we drop that part?”

Leigh’s casual shrug bends him around her, metaphorically, as the arbiter of his future freedom. “I’ll drop it permanently if you answer a few questions.”

“What kind of questions?” he narrows his eyes, not in suspicion, not in mistrust, but in genuine concern for her welfare. “I sense this is about the stabbing thing, which, hear me out: you do not want to know this stuff. Especially not if--” he stops himself, because it’s kind of a Commitment Sentence, if he’s honest, and you don’t spring those on a woman this early, even if she is your soulmate. Hell, Tony’s not sure he wants to spring that sentence on  _ himself, _ despite how much he wants her. He’s hardly ever had to deny himself, when he’s wanted someone physically. What scares him is the suspicion that he wouldn’t be satisfied with ‘just’ a physical relationship. He’d like her to want him in more ways than that.

He’d been about to say,  _ Especially not if we’re going to try to make this work, _ like ‘make this work’ didn’t evoke the kinds of scenes in romance movies where the two lovers stay in bed all day and night, take cute photos of themselves at a museum or on a damned  _ boat _ or something, then fucking  _ cook a meal _ together-- and oh, shit, oh  _ shit,  _ they’ve already done that one.  _ Shit, _ Tony says, in his head. He’s never, ever telling Rhodey about any of this.

Unfortunately, Leigh’s looking at him speculatively, and he realizes his mistake too late.

“Starting now. What did you stop yourself from saying?”

“You’re serious, with this? You’ll actually press charges, if I’m not down for the Balci interrogation, right here, right now?” Tony blusters, hoping if he can get her to defend her choices, she’ll forget what she’s just asked.

“What was it? And, before you try to deflect any more, I can tell that’s what you’re doing. You’re… determined not to tell me whatever it was, which seems like a serious miscalculation, from where I’m standing. You had to know I was going to ask.” She moves away from the wall and circles around to stand in the very center of the bunker, forcing Tony to turn to face her. She’s in complete control.

He wonders how far she’ll take it. Maybe he can derail her right now with the answer to her current question, because Tony’s come to realize in the past twenty-four hours that he’s invested, despite his current freak-out.

“All right, I’ll tell you,” Tony says, putting his hands up. He makes direct eye contact with her, and says, “Last chance, though. I’m not ashamed of any of it. I stopped for your sake, not mine.” He’s lying, lying, lying.

“You’re really going to play chicken with me over this?” she breathes, reading him like a spiking odometer.

“Yes.” He pulls out the look that always used to pull the female reporters, sliding one hand into his pants pocket, his thumb and forefinger framing his chin as he narrows his eyes at her.

“Tell me,” Leigh says, steely-eyed. Then she says, “Wait--” and lifts her hand, slides it through her hair, and settles a swathe of it over her shoulder. Sliding her fingers through it until there’s just an inch sticking through, she lifts that small, soft section and deliberately brushes it against her lips. “Go,” she says.

When they get out of the bunker, Tony resolves to spend the next  _ full month _ kissing her. Freak-out about ‘making this work’ or not. 

“All right,” he says, casting back to the conversation, to give the inflammatory comment context. “You do not want to know this stuff. Especially not if we’re going to try to make this work.”

She’d steeled herself not to react, Tony sees, but it wasn’t enough. Her eyes widen incrementally and her lips part to suck in a surprised breath. Then, suddenly, she’s doubtful. “That’s not what you were going to say,” Leigh accuses.

Tony grins, triumphant. “It is. I thought it might be too much, too fast. Didn’t want to scare you.”

“Scare?!” she scoffs, but he’s got the upper hand, now. Tony takes a step forward.

“Yep. Because that whole time you were rehearsing your first words smackdown against Tony Stark, I was falling for my feisty architect.”

“Feisty is a five foot five or below descriptor,” Leigh objects, but it’s a weak retort. Tony steps forward again.

“Witty,” he offers. “Brazen. Sassy.”

Leigh’s eye roll on ‘sassy’ is heartfelt, and he thinks there might be a story there. He files that away for later and takes another step.

_ “Anthony, _ you’re changing the subject, and you know it!” Leigh admonishes.

“You’re the one pushing,  _ Felicia,” _ he says. Her reaction to her full name is about as unfavorable as Tony’s to Anthony, and he files that away, too. “Come on, then. Bring the tough questions, Firebrand.”

“You were stabbed? By whom?” She asks them quickly, matter-of-factly, and he answers in kind.

“Thanos.”

Leigh’s head tilt threatens fury if he’s lying, but Tony holds eye contact. He watches her expression turn from disbelief to bleak acceptance.

“You said he spoke to you, recognized you.” 

He nods his head up, slowly brings it down, knowing what she’s going to ask him. Tony’s a bit irritated that she’s able to seep into his weak places with such startling perception.

“What did he say?”

“That he hoped the people of Earth would remember me.” He forces himself to smile, feels how fake it is. “Kind of a megalomaniac, that guy. We were light-years from Earth, no security cameras. Not sure how he thought they’d even know.”

“That you fought for us? We knew.” Leigh’s expression bears the kind of patriotic pride he’d seen women show for Cap all the time. Tony always thought it was a put-on, trying to get in on America’s Ass. Seeing it on her face, knowing she’s sincere… it has the potential to reshuffle some of his opinions. The re-org isn’t welcome, not after the possibility of his death caused Strange to give up so easily.

“This isn’t a therapy session,” Tony says, edging the words with venom.

“No, you’re right,” Leigh smiles benignly. “It’s a confessional. You’re supposed to speak truth there.”

“So speak it, Felicia,” Tony says, and he recognizes what he’s doing, his  _ Mom _ used to do this, the way you only use full names when the person’s in trouble, but Leigh forced him to show her something private, and he’s lashing out. He can see her regret, but it’s not enough to prevent his next words. “You were angry enough to include ‘all your hopes and dreams’ in the words embedded in my thigh, so what’s that about? Hmm? How did I take those from you?”

“You’re serious with this?” Leigh asks, mirroring his words from minutes before.

“When does anyone get to fight this dirty without somewhere to retreat to?” Tony asks her, careful not to let his triumph show. He’s neatly turned the tables, shifted the conversation away from the things he doesn’t want to tell her, but she’s sharp. He can’t overplay it. “They meant something, or you wouldn’t have included them.”

Leigh comes over to Tony, but instead of saying something, she walks around behind him, out of sight, but not out of contact. She’s so close he can feel her, the furnace-hot pull of her body. Leigh Balci might look sweet, she might seem gentle, but Tony’s learning that she’s  _ adroit. _ Tony wonders how many people she handles without them ever realizing it’s happened. 

She rests her hands on his hips, leans up, her breasts brushing against his back as she lifts herself up just a bit. “I know what you’re doing,” she says, her lips to his ear.

Every single atom of his body is on fire. He’s getting hard. She’ll know it. He’s pretty sure she  _ expects _ it.

When Leigh walks around the other side of him, she looks as wholesome as ever.

“I told you I latched onto my soulmark pretty much as soon as I learned about soulmates, yes? Well, I went a little overboard. You could say I Pollyanna’d my situation, if you know what I mean.”

Tony shakes his head, unfamiliar.

“Hayley Mills Disney film, I think? Little girl has a shitty life, always looks on the bright side, even when she falls down and gets paralyzed. My soulmate was going to make it all better. The big family that was a sticking point for some men in the past? Gone. I’d be able to forget Thanos ever existed and just focus on him. I came up with a whole persona, a whole life to look forward to.” Leigh covers her face with her hands and makes an embarrassed little groan. “Me as the breadwinner. He’d be, I don’t know, an artist, or even a carpenter. Someone whose work could enhance mine.”

“You wanted your soulmate to make custom doorstops for your clients, admit it,” Tony tells her, painfully aware of how much he does  _ not _ fit the picture she’d painted for him.

“Tony!”

“I want to punch that guy and he doesn’t even exist,” he continues, watching her. “So what terrible scenario were you re-picturing, when it turned out to be me?” 

Leigh rubs her face with her hands, slides them down over her shoulders to her upper arms. “At first? I thought you’d try to seduce me.”

Heat spreads from where she’d already sparked it. Tony’s grateful that the sweatshirt he’d dug out of the walls is oversized, hanging far enough down to hide his reaction to her.

“I still might.” He shrugs like it doesn’t matter. “If you want.”

Incongruously, Leigh giggles, and he’s once again struck by the fact that he  _ cannot predict her. _ “No, no, I’m trying to tell you-- Can you imagine? What if our Words were the  _ same?” _

She means he’d make her cry out his name. He wants to. Tony doesn’t even hide it when he looks over at her.  _ “That _ would be worth practicing,” he says, holding Leigh’s gaze steadily before she bites her lip and looks down.

_ “Boss?”  _

Tony lets out a growling sound and glares up at the ceiling, and Leigh sucks in an amused laugh, so he glares at her too. “Yes?”

“ _ I’ve analyzed the correspondence you’ve received during the past thirty hours. There are a few issues you’ll need to address before the bunker reaches the unlock stage.” _

“Are they serious enough to enable the override?” Leigh asks.

_ “That would be inadvisable, Miss Balci. Your employer and Stark Industries have both sent security to your apartment, but it appears that your landlord is displeased with current developments.” _

Leigh’s light-hearted attempt to persuade FRIDAY to let them out early collapses with this revelation. It’s not disappointment, though. She almost deflates, and he gets the sense that this is not a new feeling when it comes to her landlord. Leigh slowly moves to sit in a camp chair, and then speaks in a resigned voice.

“Thirty day notice?”

_ “Three day cure or quit, handed over this morning. The lease our representative requested access to includes a clause allowing such a request over excessive police, press, or employer activity.” _

“I got you evicted?” Tony asks, horrified.

Leigh’s frustration irons itself out using humor as heat. “The press got me evicted. Your celebrity status got me evicted. Your parents had a child, who then subsequently grew up--”

“All right, all right,” Tony interrupts, amused but worried for her. “You’re not more upset?”

“I hate that guy. I hate the apartment. And my lease term is up at the end of August.”

“You found a new place to live after the Snap,” Tony says, understanding. 

“I signed the lease after a month in hotels, driving back and forth from Pennsylvania. Everything was a mess; missing landlords, missing tenants. I was lucky to find anything,” she tells him. “Turns out the place was pretty bad even before the tenant was Snapped. I know my rights, so my landlord hates me right back.”

“You were planning to move anyway, then?” he asks, an idea starting to form in his mind. She nods.

“Three days, though, that throws a wrench. Why do slumlords get more devious as time passes?” Leigh asks, groaning.

“Translation?”

“The ‘employer activity.’ Excuse me, Miss AI, I don’t remember your name. Did you say there were people guarding the apartment for me? Against the press?”

_ “Mr. Harriot requested security from Stark Industries to stand guard at your apartment until your landlord threatened to trespass them from the property. Due to the level of press attention, Mr. Fisher from SI is in the process of requesting an injunction against your landlord to prevent him from requiring you leave your property unguarded.” _

“It’s reached the level of legal intervention?” Tony breaks in, surprised. He’s even more surprised when Leigh responds, instead of FRIDAY.

“This is perfect for that slimeball. He’s probably sooooo proud of himself, too!” she says. “I’m evicted no matter what happens. Press activity, prompting police intervention if they manage to break in, but if they don’t break in because of the guards from your company, that qualifies as ‘employer activity.’ That utter  _ walnut _ is going to win.”

Tony holds back his laughter at ‘walnut,’ because Leigh’s situation is all his fault, no matter how much she argues that she could have said his Words at a different time.

“Come live in my tower,” he says suddenly.

“I--”

“No, really,” he steamrolls her. “There are multiple apartments. I have the kind of tech that means you could meet with clients in a virtual environment, wherever they like. I have a private jet to fly you to what you can’t do virtually. It’s secure-- there are laws about flying drones up to look into high rise windows, and no press is going to make it inside the building.”

“Tony, I can’t just--”

He knows he hasn’t learned a damned thing from locking her away with him in the bunker, but he wants to protect her almost as much as he doesn’t want her to live in a different state. “You can. You’ll probably have to. FRIDAY, are there any messages from Harriot?”

_ “Just one.” _

Tony’s gotten the chance to observe Leigh for many hours at this point, and he finds it kind of fascinating, the way she starts changing in various subtle ways to listen to the voicemail. It’s as if she shifts into  _ office _ mode. Leigh sits up, her shoulders straighten along with her spine, her chin lifts, and the furrows of concern melt away on her forehead. He’s never really thought about how much or how little of  _ himself _ he ought to bring to work, like that’s something people need to consider.

“Play it, please?” she asks FRIDAY.

_ “Hey, Leigh,” _ Branson says. Already, Tony’s on edge. Harriot sounds apologetic.  _ “So, I’ll be straight with you: the press are going crazy on us right now. I won’t pretend that this isn’t because of Stark’s prominence, and I won’t lie to you that it’ll relax in any way once you’re out of there. I like the guy, by the way, but if he’s holding you against your will, say the word, and we’ll unleash hellfire.” _

“Pause,” Leigh calls out.

“Duly noted,” Tony tells her, raising both hands in surrender.

“Play,” she says, her voice rich and amused.

_ “So we have a few options, but none are ideal. One, we upgrade security at the office. Our building is classified as historically significant, and the process to do any useful alterations will take eighteen months, at minimum. Two, you relocate to working from home, we give you a travel allowance and other perks to compensate for the massive inconvenience. Three, a leave of absence for however long until this dies down. Leigh, honey, I am sorry to have to offer these. You’re a fantastic worker, an asset to the company. I’m hoping you’ll choose number two. I have reached out to Stark Industries--” _

“Stop,” Leigh calls out. Tony gives her a look, and she says, “I can listen to the rest later, in private. I think it’ll be about the apartment, and, well. That’s enough news for right now, don’t you think? I have no job and nowhere to live, without your help.”

She doesn’t sound as upset as she ought to, Tony thinks-- and he doesn’t  _ feel _ as upset about it as he ought to, either.


	6. Chapter Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Seconds later the plane touches down, and Tony glances at Leigh to see if she’ll wake up with the bump of landing. She does. Initially confused, she seems to get nervous and agitated as she looks around at the unfamiliar surroundings. That is, until she sees Tony. After she locks eyes with him, Leigh lets out a breath, possibly of relief, and her death grip on her chair arms loosens.
> 
> It’s maybe too much responsibility for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was never good at being patient. New chapter it is!

### Chapter Six

Leigh actually heads to sleep after Branson’s voicemail, skipping dinner. She dons the noise-canceling headphones he’d stocked in the bunker as a concession to the idea that the future occupants might need the illusion of privacy. Her hair is braided up tight again, tucked around her head like a protective serpent.

Bottom line, Tony has to make this better.

Telling himself it would have happened anyway, as Branson had hinted at, well. Whether that’s true or not, it happened _this_ way, and this is what he has to deal with. He huddles over by FRIDAY’s speaker all evening and into the night, organizing things for the morning.

First, Tony sends a team of twenty guys to Leigh’s apartment to pack everything up and take it to New York, to the tower. She’ll say yes in the morning, and if she doesn’t, he’ll find her somewhere to live, without her ever having to deal with that landlord again. Packing sucks, she’ll get over it.

As a giant ‘fuck you’ to the press camped outside of Leigh’s apartment, Tony makes sure the moving guys have a few full sized sheets made of that anti-paparazzi material that ruins flash photographs.

He pays overtime for some of his tech guys to convert Bruce’s old lab next to his into a virtual workspace for her. A late-night call with Branson allows one of his movers to drop by and pick up some of Leigh’s work things, but not all of them, because Tony hopes that things will die down eventually. Charriotte deserves to have the facility upgrade whether or not she’ll ever be able to work there again, honestly, so for good measure he hires a legal team to get that in motion.

Branson is _insufferable_ about the situation. He’s a smart man, and the whole office had known about Leigh’s laryngitis fakeout. The thing is, Tony actually doesn’t want to tell Harriot what Leigh’s first words were to him. He doesn’t want her boss to lose any respect for the kind, competent person she is at work, because her decision to use them as a weapon against Tony is their business alone.

He walks over to the air mattress at around one in the morning, ostensibly to check on her, but it’s really just to ease his conscience. Tony’s no stranger to nightmares, and he knows their signature. Leigh hadn’t borne those signs the night before, but tonight she has some new burdens, ones Tony’s hefted onto her shoulders.

Leigh’s sleeping face is serene, he’s relieved to see. She’s huddled herself up against the wall, which tells him that her bed is probably set up that way. In another life, or perhaps far in the future, the space left beside her on the mattress would be enough for him to occupy, but not tonight. Instead, he lays down right on the rug beside it, pillows his head on his arm, and closes his eyes to wait for his turn.

8888888888

Tony wakes up disoriented. His hips don’t hurt, his neck doesn’t hurt, and he’s lying on something softer than a rug on top of the lakebed. He’s under a _blanket._

When his eyes adjust to the low light, he understands that he’s on the air mattress. He would never choose to sleep in this position, meaning-- meaning that Leigh had probably rolled him up onto the mattress, covered him with a blanket, and left him to sleep. And Tony, the man of nightmares about fighting aliens and dropping out of a portal in the sky, of calling his suits to protect him in his sleep? Didn’t wake up enough to remember.

Fear grips him for a bizarre second. Is this an insidious way of lowering his guard? Are soulmates designed to showcase human weakness? But he rejects this almost as quickly. Thanos is both dead _and_ finished, and the Titan hadn’t seemed to be bothered by either state of being. The insidious part is simple: Tony failed, and now he gets to attribute his future happiness to an action by Thanos, his mortal enemy. It’s causal. If (Tony fails) then (he gets a soulmate). If he rejects her, it’s still a gotcha. A lose/lose.

Except, from where Tony is, literally _tucked in_ by a person that’s becoming very important to him, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. If you are happy despite all efforts to poison that happiness, aren’t you the victor in that scenario? It’s a new thought, and Tony’s not sure whether he’s grasping at straws or a complete genius (there are levels of genius, and relationships were never his strong suit). He’s not ready to accept that Thanos has done something valuable with soulmates, but he’s not (as annoying as it is to even think the cliche phrase) going to look a gift horse in the mouth. At least not right now.

He sits up slowly, looking for Leigh. Tony spots her sitting in the corner in a camp chair, her feet up on the other one, reading quietly on the kindle paperwhite he’d stuck in a pocket on a whim.

“FRIDAY, what time is it?” he asks.

_“It is 7:45 in the morning. You have forty minutes before the magnetic locks disengage. A helicopter will arrive five minutes beforehand, and you and Miss Balci will trade places with the security team that will pack up and dismantle the bunker, if that’s all right with you, Boss.”_

“That’s up to the other boss,” Tony says, looking over at Leigh. She rewards him with a shy smile at the term, then gets up and pushes a button. The Keurig starts up, and he mouths a ‘thank you.’ “Can you make sure someone returns the rental van and gets my StarkPad back where it belongs?”

_“Already done.”_

“Speaking of already done,” Tony says to Leigh. “I made a command decision to pack up your apartment.” He stands by the coffeemaker waiting for her reaction.

“Thank you. With less than an hour to go, I’ll see what kind of last-minute moving van I can get,” she says, making a face.

He’d forgotten she’s not calibrated to billionaire like he is. “No, I’m saying it’s probably done by now. On one of our trucks.”

“...overnight?” she asks, disbelieving.

“Money can’t buy happiness but it sure as hell eliminates the shit that makes us miserable,” he quips. His coffee is finished, but Tony pauses, looks at her stunned expression, and holds his hand out. Leigh’s brow furrows for a second before she gives him her mug, and he hands her his full one.

“Did you do this because the truck is on its way to New York City?” Leigh asks him, lifting the new mug for a sip.

He didn’t, but it’s an easy way to break it to her. “Yes.”

“I don’t know anything about New York City,” Leigh says. Her eyes are guarded.

“I can show you.” Tony wonders if what _he_ pictures when he says that (Leigh’s face when she sees the view from his penthouse, sharing some of the good restaurants with her, maybe even taking her somewhere with the suit) is the same as what she pictures (thrift stores? Museums, almost a guarantee. Broadway? Tony winces inwardly).

“What about my five cats?” she asks, biting her lip and looking at him with crystal sincerity.

He almost, _almost_ tells her, curtly, that he had them euthanized, because he knows she’s kidding. He had been on the video call when his people first went in so he could ensure they took a ton of photos to recreate her apartment in New York. He knows for a fact that she does not have cats.

“No cats.”

Leigh’s solemn demeanor fractures into laughter. “Aww, I was just about to tell you I named them all after the Avengers. All but you,” she says. 

Her amusement is infectious, but Tony’s immune. Being reminded of the Avengers means being reminded about the text message he’d gotten from Steve and Nat, six months ago. No messages for months beforehand, none since.

_‘Barton’s gone rogue.’_

There’s an inbox specifically designed to keep all attachments that Dr. Bruce Banner sends in his emails, no matter how long they sit unread.

Another inbox (the one Tony’s most ashamed of) is set up to use FRIDAY to scan the sporadic emails that Natasha sends him. The AI calculates a non-committal, cooly caring response to send in return, without any input from him. Nat _has to know,_ but she keeps emailing.

Tony thinks FRIDAY keeps the five emails he’s gotten from Steve Rogers over the course of their association in an old file folder marked as something else. He’s never searched for them, because then he might read them, and he can’t do that without feeling things he’d rather not feel. Things he’s feeling right now.

Fuck, he misses them.

_Fuck._

Leigh gets up and hands him her still-warm, half full coffee cup, and he drinks it, keeps swallowing until it’s gone. When he looks for her afterwards, she’s putting on the overalls and jacket she’d been wearing when he’d first seen her on-site two days ago.

“Do you want me to avoid mentioning them, Tony?” Leigh asks quietly.

He wants to say yes.

He needs to say yes.

“No.”

8888888888

They hear the helicopter before the ceiling hatch releases. Tony can see that Leigh’s anxiety level has skyrocketed, but he’s never really given that much of a shit what the press thinks. Advising her on how to handle it when she is someone who does care is tone deaf. Especially since they’re only swarming because of him in the first place.

So, Tony feels like the two of them are oddly disconnected from each other as he stands on the collapsible step stool waiting for the seconds to tick down so he can open the hatch. When it unlocks, he pulls himself up and out, sitting with his legs in the opening for a short while as he looks around. His plan with the local police has succeeded, after a fashion-- the press were trespassed off of Tony’s property, which extends to thirty more feet from the bunker. The airspace above them is also restricted, with his helicopter exempted, of course. So, there’s no camp of vultures nearby. They’re located far enough away that Leigh should be able to relax when she sees things aren’t as bad as she’d been expecting. No matter who Tony’s neighbors are, the chances they could turn down the amount of money those guys probably threw at them for access is basically nil. He doesn’t blame them much.

“You ready?” he calls down.

“Almost,” Leigh responds. She sounds like she just got done laughing, and when she walks over to stand under the opened hatch, she’s not wearing the overalls anymore. Her skirt looks different, too.

Tony leans over to help her climb up. Once she’s standing beside him, Leigh straightens up and lifts one leg to brush her hand over it, like she’s trying to hide something. Her ankle-length skirt is now a miniskirt; he assumes the bulk of it is hiding under the work coat she’s still got on. His guys come over with a ladder, and Leigh waves Tony on first. She’s still got her hand on her leg, as if she’d injured it and she’s trying to keep the blood from staining her skirt, but the expression on her face is barely-concealed amusement, so Tony’s at a complete loss.

Leigh climbs down the ladder and jogs over to get into the helicopter, and he climbs in after her. They settle in with their seatbelts, and the stomach-dropping lurch of takeoff tells Tony that the hard part is over.

He looks over at Leigh. She’s obviously _terrified._

It hits him: she wasn’t afraid of the press at all. She’s afraid of _flying._

“Hey, you still with me?” he asks her, pitching his voice in the middle of comforting and teasing.

“Oh sure, yep, you’ve got it,” she mutters.

“You could have told me.”

“Yeah, I could have. I mean, pile on the dramatic irony, right?” The helicopter banks into a turn, and Leigh’s face loses all color. Tony unbuckles and scoots right up next to her, pulling her to his chest. “No, no, no, buckle back up, that does _not_ make me less nervous, _God!”_ she complains.

“Nope, get it all out. Tell me exactly how much you hate this. Swear, even,” Tony tells her. She’s trembling in his arms, clutching handfuls of shirt fabric. “It helps, didn’t you watch Mythbusters?”

“That was _pain,_ Tony,” Leigh complains.

“I’m definitely a pain,” he teases. “Fine, if you won’t unleash a blue streak, tell me what’s up with the skirt.” Leigh laughs into his chest, warm puffs of air that help him feel useful in his self-appointed task to soothe her.

She pulls back and says, “I knew they’d be trying to take high quality photos to check for soulmarks, so I thought I’d help a little.” Leigh rests her left ankle on her right knee. There, written in blocky handwriting, are the words ‘ **Fuck the press.** ’

Tony reaches out and spreads his thumb across the letters. It’s the sort of thing he would have done shortly after his parents died, rebellious, using his antagonists against themselves.

“I seriously considered using a Bible verse to make them have to _look up_ a verse telling them off, but I needed to pick something you’d actually _say,”_ Leigh tells him. She sounds uncertain, and Tony looks from the defiant words on her leg to her face.

“It’s perfect,” he tells her. The helicopter turns again, only slightly. Leigh gasps. Her hand is resting on his arm from her change of position, and her fingers curl into a defensive fist around his shirtsleeve. “What can I do?” Tony asks, tipping his head to the side.

Leigh closes her eyes tightly. “Distract me. Oh, _stars,_ helicopters are like airplanes on speed, way more responsive, I can feel every little adjustment.”

She’s got a death grip on his sleeve, so Tony takes his other hand and smooths it along her arm, across the coarse fabric of the work jacket. The tension on her face eases a tiny bit. He slides that hand up, taking a chance, rubbing his thumb on her neck. Leigh lets out the breath she was holding.

Desire tightens in his gut. Tony continues the sweep of his thumb along her neck, watching her tension unspool as his ratchets up. He presses a little harder with the next caress. Leigh’s fist loosens, and her hand grips his arm instead of his sleeve. The helicopter jumps, like it’s skipped over an air pocket, and Leigh startles, turning her face into his hand, her lips on the base of his thumb. 

She lets out a breath, and the heat it generates for him isn’t only centered on where he’s touching her. Tony’s breathing hard. He feels like a complete _ass,_ because while he’s enjoying everything about this moment, Leigh’s probably just trying to cope with being frightened. He’s taking advantage. Tony starts to pull his hand away, but Leigh opens her mouth to object. The movement strokes his thumb along her lip, ramping up his arousal like an uncontrolled burn. 

In any other situation, Tony would be like his old self, pulling her roughly to him, mastering her, taking what he wanted. But Leigh is like spun glass right now, delicate, breakable. He has no idea how to handle a woman like that. He’s never cared to try.

Leigh opens her eyes. Tony’s hand is cupping her cheek, his thumb resting on her lower lip. He takes a chance and moves it, the angle opening her mouth just a bit. Her eyes flutter closed for just a moment, a sign that she’s affected, that she might want-- Then Leigh’s hand on his arm tugs him toward her.

All self-control gone, Tony leans in and drags his thumb down, opening her for him. He’s eager and desperate; none of his feelings about Leigh are subtle, and neither is this kiss. Tony loves the warm, startled way she kisses back, her hand at his chest. Leigh’s every bit as dynamic now as she has been for the past two days, pushing against him, then yielding sweetly. He’s greedy, sucking on her lip, even though it could be too much, too soon for her.

The little whimper she lets out is _everything._ He’s burning up and she’s melting into him, her hand caught in his collar now, hanging on. Tony takes the way she moves closer as a cue to be bolder, letting himself taste her. Leigh answers the brushes of his tongue against hers, once, twice, more confident each time. It’s perfect, she’s perfect, and he never wants to stop.

“Descending into the airport now, sir,” the pilot says over the PA system.

Leigh pulls back immediately but lays her warm hand on his cheek like an apology, resting her forehead near his collarbone. Tony turns his head just enough to whisper in her ear.

“Well, you wanted to be distracted. You’re welcome.” He hears the huskiness in his voice and wishes he could know how Leigh's body is reacting to it. One of Tony’s favorite things to do in bed is to watch for and feel those reactions in a partner.

“We haven’t _landed_ yet, and if you die because you’re not buckled in I will figure out how to haunt you!” she hisses, once again caught up in her fear.

“You’ve got to tell me whether you’d rather yell at me about buckling or have me buckle up because I’m game for either,” Tony tells her. She glares at him and points, forcefully, at the nearest seat with a belt. He buckles in, but a minute later they’re down, so technically he chose both options.

He doesn’t get to tell her that, though, because Leigh does not waste time getting out of the helicopter. Tony’s barely standing when he hears her already speaking to someone. Their voices are chased away by the rotor sounds, so he gets out and starts looking around.

Then he sees them. Rhodey and Leigh, shaking hands.

“No, no, no, break it up!” Tony says, waving his hand like an angry monarch. “You: over there,” he points to Rhodey and gestures off into the far distance. “You-- back in the helicopter. No fraternizing.”

“But I’m scared of the helicopter,” Leigh says, backing away from him towards Rhodey. “And he’s a pilot.”

“You got to _professions?”_ Tony literally can not believe it. They’re allies already.

“Hey, good to see you, man,” Rhodey says with an easy grin. “Been a while.”

“Yeah, I’m not the one dodging calls-- or, at least, I wasn’t, until yesterday.” Tony lifts his chin and looks Rhodey in the eye. “Don’t tell me you’re here to gloat.”

Rhodes shoots a look over at Leigh, his brows furrowing, before he shakes his head. “Did you _listen_ to the messages I left for you?”

Tony makes a noise that’s somewhere between ‘profoundly hurt by the implication that I wouldn’t’ and ‘of course not.’ There’s only a five percent chance those messages weren’t about soulmates. Then again, Tony’s always been the kind of guy who breaks all the rules about odds.

“Anyway, c’mon, the plane’s ready to leave.” Rhodes gestures toward the private plane and starts heading over to it, and Leigh smiles sweetly over at Tony before she follows. She’s putting up a good front, but he can tell that she’s still anxious. 

Before they walk inside, she turns to tell him, “I’m at least grateful that we did the vehicles in this order. You’d probably have to tranquilize me to go from plane to helicopter!”

“You’ll be able to sleep through the flight if you want. Pretty sure there’s a bed,” Rhodey says as he steps inside.

Tony takes that as a subtle threat even if his friend hadn’t meant it that way. Rhodey knows what he used to get up to on this thing.

Leigh stops in her tracks once she gets three feet into the plane. Her hands scrabble at the buttons of the heavyweight jacket she’s wearing, and she strips it off as if wearing it in a place like this is actively shameful. Tony snags it from her nerveless fingers, watching her remember that she’d tucked up her skirt, and self-consciously tug it down.

“I didn’t realize…” she says, quietly. 

Tony hands the jacket to one of the stewardesses, suddenly wishing there was a way to skip Leigh ahead through whatever existential crisis she’s having. He walks up behind her and places his hand at her back, close enough for her to sense its presence, but not actually touching.

“You don’t have to be Amelia Earhart, you’ll be fine,” Tony says, leading her to a seat. He sits down across from her as she buckles.

“No, that was an Orphan Annie reaction, there. I’ve worked for wealthy people before, but--”

She’s interrupted by Rhodey laughing as hard as Tony’s ever heard him, his eyes wide, hands clasped together. “Oh, this is going to be fun as hell, Daddy Warbucks.”

“Pipe down,” Tony tells him. To Leigh, he says, “You were saying?” But Leigh is almost a shadow of her vibrant self, eyes wide, shrinking into her seat.

“Aerophobia?” Rhodes asks her. Despite being a pilot, his tone is kind.

“Yep,” Leigh says, leaning her head back on the seat and closing her eyes.

“I didn’t mean to--” Rhodey says, probably meaning his earlier laughter, but Tony shakes his head.

“Rhodey’s right, there is a bed, if you want to try to sleep through the worst of it,” he offers her.

Leigh opens her eyes and stares at him. “A bed.” She states it like he’s teasing her. 

Tony can’t put his finger on what her issue is, but it’s starting to trigger his need to be defensive. He reminds himself that she is very afraid right now, so he just lifts both hands in mock surrender. “You can get drunk instead, if you’d like that better.”

“What if I want a shitty package of peanuts?” she asks, a bit of the fire he’s used to seeing back in her voice.

“Sorry, nut free plane.”

Rhodey starts coughing vociferously. Tony _really_ hopes the source of his laughter isn’t R rated.

“I guess money can’t buy everything,” Leigh says primly. The act doesn’t quite work, because he’s been around her long enough to know when she’s holding back a laugh. The intimacy of that knowledge sits pleasantly in his chest.

8888888888

Leigh does end up getting some sleep on the flight, mostly thanks to the headphones one of the flight attendants donates to the cause. The young woman even gives up her StarkPhone so that Leigh, whose own phone is waiting for her in her new apartment in the city, can listen to music. Tony and Rhodey mostly speak about inconsequential things, using low voices even though it’s obvious to Tony that Leigh has drifted off by halfway through the flight.

As they descend into New York, Rhodey nods over at Leigh’s leg, a confused, amused look on his face. Tony follows his gaze and laughs.

“Her concession to being hounded by the press the second we got out of the bunker,” he explains. The only thing visible is ‘press,’ so Tony gets to tell Rhodey the entire line, which his friend greatly appreciates.

“Tony, I truthfully did not come to gloat, man. I wanted to make sure you were all right. It’s… look--” 

Rhodey sits forward in his chair, tossing a look in Leigh’s direction, probably to make sure she’s still asleep. Tony’s not sure what kind of deep truth is about to be imparted, but he doesn’t feel quite as resistant to it as he might have been if he’d been trapped with basically anyone else for two straight days. 

“You’ve never been the type to hang out with a large group of close friends, but it’s felt like your sphere has shrunk down to just me, and sometimes not even that, lately. I genuinely didn’t know what kind of shape you’d be in, after forty-eight hours,” Rhodey says quietly. “I thought at the very least you’d be manic, with your asshole switch flipped past eleven.”

“How does it feel to be wrong?” Tony asks smugly.

“Might want to check that last one,” Rhodes cautions. “But nah, I’ll cop to that. Glad to see it. But I guess if you spent that time with a woman willing to write swear words on her body to troll the press, it’s not all that surprising.” He looks down at the floor, glancing over at Leigh without turning his head. “Especially if she looks like that.”

Tony gives himself permission to look over at Leigh, taking in the dusting of freckles over her cheeks and nose, the way her chest rises and falls with her sleeping breaths. The hair around her face has loosened from her braid a bit, with one lock pulled free and resting in a loop against her cheek.

“One more thing. If I promise not to give you shit about it: _is_ she your soulmate?”

Tony’s eyes immediately seek out Leigh’s right wrist, where it looks like she’s placed two large square band-aids over his name as a precautionary measure. He thinks she probably expected to hide them in the work coat.

“No comment, is the agreed line,” Tony says, sitting back with a deliberately insufferable smirk. He knows the smile he’s wearing is insincere, knows Rhodey recognizes that too.

“There’s no shame in being happy, Tony.”

“Speaking of which, how’s that going, Colombo? Last I tried to contact you, you were on _vacation.”_ Rhodes isn’t really a vacation guy, not that Tony hasn’t dragged him on a few despite that.

Rhodey’s smile is just shy of self-satisfied. “It was a long time coming. We had fun.”

“Yeah, not as easy to answer when the shoe’s on the other foot, is it?” Tony can’t resist goading him.

“Hey, you’re the one who always told me to keep the soulmate shit to myself. I’m happy to compare notes, but I’m just following orders, Mr. Stark.”

Seconds later the plane touches down, and Tony glances at Leigh to see if she’ll wake up with the bump of landing. She does. Initially confused, she seems to get nervous and agitated as she looks around at the unfamiliar surroundings. That is, until she sees Tony. After she locks eyes with him, Leigh lets out a breath, possibly of relief, and her death grip on her chair arms loosens.

It’s maybe too much responsibility for him.

“Wow.” Tony compensates with a shit-eating grin on his face. “I can’t believe you slept through that. There could have been Langoliers or something.”

“Your Stephen King is rusty-- the sleeping people are _safe,”_ Leigh says, stretching her arms above her head, then languidly pulling them back, hands fisted, back arched. She’s not doing it to be alluring, but it is, very much so.

The seatbelt light goes off, and all three of them stand up to disembark, now that the ground crew is attaching the stairs. Leigh’s strange, uncomfortable look is back, but Tony assumes it’s flight related.

“I’m gonna drive back, got something to pick up for Leshia,” Rhodey says.

“Miss, ‘I’m not one for soldiers?’” Tony asks pleasantly.

Rhodey gives him a hard look. “That’s the one.”

“It was lovely meeting you,” Leigh says, holding out her hand to shake Rhodes’. Rhodey takes it, shakes, then turns her hand to the side, looking at the cluster of bandaids on her wrist.

“Might want to get that looked at,” he says, hiking an eyebrow at Tony.

“If you’re looking for a soulmark, you’re a few feet too high,” Leigh tells Rhodey, pulling her hand free.

“Oh, I disregarded that one,” he tells her, heading for the door. Rhodey turns around, nodding at the flight attendant who opens it for him. “It’s not in Tony’s handwriting.” He nods at Tony and jogs down the stairs, out of sight.

“I like him,” Leigh says.

“That’s because I’m a good judge of character,” Tony says. 

At the bottom of the stairs, there are two cars, one of the black ones that Happy drives him around to events, and the new Tesla he hasn’t gotten to drive yet. Tony tells Leigh he’ll be right back, and he walks over to speak with the chauffeur. Hogan’s away on a special assignment for much of the summer. The two people in the back seat roll down the window so he can see that, yep, they’re passable. Tony pats the top of the car and jogs back to Leigh.

“Ready?” She nods. Tony doesn’t end up doing the chivalrous thing, because the guy who brought the car opens the door for her and helps her in, but that’s fine. He settles into his seat and starts adjusting things. “Comfortable?”

“Astonishingly so,” Leigh says in an awed voice. “This is… really something.”

“Yeah, I sprang for the Founder’s edition. Though, I think Elon might have comped it if I’d pushed,” Tony admits. He starts navigating the complicated process of driving a car out of a space designed for airplanes, grateful that Leigh doesn’t resent not being his focus of attention.

When they’re finally on an actual road, Tony looks over. Leigh looks stunned.

“Yeah, I was looking forward to this,” he says, satisfied. The car was definitely worth the wait. “Handles just like I was hoping.”

“Y-you didn’t know?” Leigh questions, her voice a stutter of surprise.

“It’s new. Was delivered last week, but I was busy,” Tony explains, brows furrowing a little. “Teslas, there’s no dealership.”

“I think I knew that, but I never really thought about the specifics. What was in the other car? Things you’d brought back with you on the plane?” Leigh tells him, hovering her hand a quarter inch above the dashboard like she’s petting a cat.

“No, that was the decoy.”

“Is there a working-class-to-billionaire dictionary you could order for me, maybe?” she laughs. There’s a brittle quality to it that makes him look over. Leigh’s a little wild around the eyes, one hand firmly planted around her braid, as if she’s holding on for dear life.

“The press is still camped out. I sent one of the cars I use for events, when I’m not driving. There’s a blonde woman and a man with a goatee in the back.”

“You had them on _retainer?”_

“You okay?” Tony asks, instead of answering her. If she weren’t so on edge, he might have made a quip about her being a nervous passenger, but Leigh’s natural fire and confidence seem to be significantly dimmed. They have been ever since the helicopter.

Leigh leans back and makes a little surprised face at how comfortable that action is. “Tony, don’t take this the wrong way, but: I can’t go home. I can’t go to work. I’m in a different state than my driver’s license or any property I own. I hate flying, but that’s what I’ve been doing for the past two hours.”

“Okay, okay,” he says, laughing only because she’s got a wry, ‘can you believe this’ expression on her face that seems to beg for a sympathetic reaction. “Well, that’s why I did it this way. The press doesn’t know this car. They’ll be watching for the decoy, and we’ll sneak in, hop on the private elevator, and get you into your new apartment.”

“Private elevator?” Leigh asks, like she’s not sure if he’s finally started to make shit up.

“Is it going to freak you out if I tell you I built the entire tower? Or that I live in the penthouse?” he teases, reaching out and tugging on her braid.

She shakes her head, chagrined. “Those I knew. Though, I’m probably not picturing it properly.”

Tony thinks about the landing platform on the upper level, the curved walkway designed to take off his suit without forcing him to slow down at all, the spectacular view. “That’s a given.”

“Honestly, today, I don’t need much. Coffee and a bed, that’s about it,” she sighs, turning her head to look out the window. “Oh, stars, I forgot where I was,” Leigh breathes, now stunned for a completely different reason. The curve of her neck is gorgeous, Tony thinks, thinking back to their kiss. There’s so much he wants to show her, so much he wants to do with her. Some of those things are even unrelated to the constant, low-level desire to touch her again that he’s had since the helicopter.

“Wait till you see the view from your apartment,” Tony tells her.

“Wait! I thought it was going to be on the ground floor, like my old one,” Leigh protests. He believes her for three whole seconds before she turns her head and he can see the impish twinkle in her eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can see why I can't quite tag it slow burn, but at 25k into the fic before a kiss chapter, it's not NOT slow burn, you know?
> 
> /me tags it 'Slow Burn If By Slow You Mean Tony Is Forced To Be Patient and By Burn You Mean They're Both Completely On Fire'


	7. Chapter Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The pizza delivery girl is very young and very peppy. She hands over the pizza, declines Leigh’s offer to rustle up a tip, and heads off, leaving Leigh standing there, bemused. The tape with Tony’s note on it has twisted, leaving the note face down, so he gives himself permission to watch her take the box into her apartment, even though it’s probably a violation of her privacy. Tony tells himself it’s just this once, and sits forward in his desk chair to watch as Leigh sets the box down on the table.
> 
> She flips over the paper, leans in. Tony curses the position of the camera, as she’s faced away from it, but then she reaches out her hand and runs her fingers across his name. Seeing this is somehow painfully intimate, and Tony closes his eyes, even though he feels an odd sense of relief and an even deeper burgeoning joy.
> 
> “FRIDAY, cut the feed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Explicit sexual content warning (probably 50% less exciting than that sounds)! I hope you enjoy Tony's PA as much as I do, he was a complete surprise during writing and I adore him now.
> 
> Personal note: I have been experiencing a worrisome eye condition over the past 24 hours and have an emergency appointment on Monday. Depending on how that goes, speed may diminish for posting, cause I'll, uh, need to be able to see to write. Just thought I'd give you all a heads-up.

### Chapter Seven

Tony’s ruse works. No press is waiting at the entrance to the garage. He pulls his new Roadster into its designated parking spot, hops out, and gets to the door just in time to help Leigh. She looks around at the cars parked around the Tesla as she follows him to the elevator. Suddenly, she stops.

“Tony?”

“Yeah?” he says, tapping in the code for the elevator.

“All of the license plates say Stark.”

“Yeah, of course they do,” he says. The elevator opens with a ding, but she’s still standing in the middle of the garage. “Leigh?”

“I have a feeling some of these cars cost more than houses I’ve designed,” she whispers.

“FRIDAY, hold the doors, will you?” Tony says quietly. He makes his way over to Leigh, notes the way she’s standing, almost forlorn, a sort of stricken look on her face. “I have a really fancy coffeemaker?” he dangles.

“I’m thinking that’s probably a given,” Leigh says. She allows him to guide her over to the elevator. “I’ll stick to my own, for tonight, if that’s all right with you.”

“Miss Balci’s apartment, please, FRIDAY,” Tony says. Maybe it’s the close quarters, maybe it’s because Leigh already knows his AI, but she seems to relax. After a ding, the doors reveal a wide open space, lit by a wall of windows that span two floors. He turns right, leads her to the first door. “Multiple avenues of entry: you can ask FRIDAY to let you in, set up a PIN for this access screen here, or we can set it up for your palm print.”

“You mean you haven’t had her scan the FBI database for my biometrics yet?” Leigh asks, her eyebrows shooting up.

“FRIDAY, can you unlock the door for Veronica Mars, here?” Tony says, stuffing both of his hands into his pockets. “Before you disappear, though-- do you like pizza? There’s this one place, kind of a ritual, if I’ve been away--”

He cuts himself off, because Leigh winces and steps close to him, her voice quiet but impassioned. “Tony, I’ll be honest here. I’m an introvert. I’ve just spent a lot of time _not alone,_ and I need to just… be, for a while.”

Tony considers playing it off, acting like he was going to offer to send the pizza to her rooms, but he doesn’t. “That’s fine,” he says, gesturing at the door. “Go, juice up.”

“Thanks,” she says, one corner of her mouth twisting up in an apologetic smile. Leigh rests a hand on the doorknob, takes a deep breath, and goes inside.

Tony should walk away now. Leigh’s made clear she wants to be alone, she’s just had to make huge adjustments to nearly all of her life and work routines, and there are undoubtedly things that his guys didn’t quite get right about her apartment setup (for one thing, it’s almost certainly at least twice the size of the last one).

He toes the floor, strains to listen in case he can hear anything, and lets out a breath. Rhodey had been right. It has been a long time, over six months, since Tony has spent any significant portion of time with someone, much less two days’ worth. He’s so used to keeping his own company now that Tony’s actually kind of surprised the time passed without much in the way of--

Leigh’s door flings open and she skids out, catching sight of him immediately.

“How on Earth did you get it so--” she stops, obviously happy, emotional about it. “Everything’s perfect. Thank you.” 

“You’re welcome. Least I could do,” Tony says, but he’s pleased. This unexpected reaction is apparently what had glued him to the floor out in this hallway, what made him wait, even though she’d told him she needed to be alone.

Leigh gets a determined look on her face, and she starts towards him, only to falter after three steps. “Thank you,” she repeats. She starts to turn, and Tony calls out to her, impulsive and greedy.

“You should do it.”

Leigh spins back to face him, a surprised laugh starting the word “What?”

“Whatever that was.” He gestures, vaguely.

Leigh regards him for a few seconds, then starts toward him again, that look of bashful determination back on her face. When she’s close enough to touch, Leigh sets her ‘Tony’ hand on his chest but doesn’t slow down, letting her momentum slide it up onto his neck. Tony is completely on board with this, resting his hands on her hips gently, remembering the way she’d seemed so delicate on the helicopter.

But this Leigh is fierce, not fragile. “Thank you,” she breathes, sinking her fingers into his hair, pulling him into a confident kiss. She pushes herself up into his mouth, joyful, warm, and willing. Tony only needs a second to adjust, and then he’s there too, one hand under her braid at her neck, the other rough at her hip. It’s not a chaste kiss, but it’s not dirty, either. It’s a ‘start of something’ kiss, learning, enjoying, wanting. It’s like Leigh’s studying him, her fingers buried in his hair, lips joining with his, clinging, adjusting to him, every time just right.

Tony’s grateful he doesn’t have any actual powers, because he is sure they’d be manifesting as something embarrassingly revealing if he did. He is completely wrecked for this woman, he’ll admit it to himself. He coaxes her mouth open and shifts his body closer, drags her to him, flush with his hips but still not close enough. At the first sweet brush of her tongue to his, though, she starts to pull back. 

It’s a generous retreat, as she unwinds from him. Leigh’s fingernails scrape along his scalp as she slides her hand back away, but the hint of suction on his lower lip when Leigh gentles the kiss floods him with pure need. Tony actually puts his hands behind his back once she steps back, allowing her to see something amusing in his internal struggle not to want to stop.

“I wanted to know what that was like, when I wasn’t scared.” Leigh says, her brown eyes amused but heated, as if her shyness is only barely just overcoming her baser desires. Tony knows where _he_ stands on that sliding scale. “And thank you, for the apartment.”

“You’re welcome,” he tells her. He didn’t mean it to sound so much like an invitation, but he can tell that she can also hear those undertones, because she bites her lip. “See you,” Tony says, and walks away toward the elevator. He doesn’t turn around to see if she’s still standing there because his self-control is still set for billionaire and she was very clear about wanting to be alone.

The elevator doors close and he allows himself to let out a loud breath. “Penthouse.”

Tony heads straight for the shower, because it’s been a while and because he’s tense and horny and a jumble of a thousand conflicting impulses. He fools himself into thinking he’ll scrub and jump back out, nothing else. Ever since losing Pepper, Tony has hated the _aftermath_ of jerking off in the shower (but of course enjoys everything else about it), because when he steps out he’s alone, and Pepper can’t give him shit about indulging himself like that, because she’s gone.

Pepper had once thought masturbation was indicative of some kind of relationship flaw, Tony had discovered-- and she’d very loyally never told him which of her few previous exes had prompted _that_ particular determination. Loyal to Tony, not the ex, because by then, Tony had the suit and Pepper had the company and she wasn’t going to let him jeopardize either by impulsively blowing some jerk’s house up. 

Once she’d understood that his choice to touch himself had nothing to do with her and everything to do with how much Tony both loves pleasure and needs that release sometimes, they’d teased each other. Somehow she _always knew_ when he’d done it, in that last year before he lost her. It was a thing, their thing, something she could mock chastise him for with code words, keeping a straight face right in the middle of a board meeting. Sometimes he’d have to pretend there was something very important about the papers in front of him until he could get up without broadcasting how hard he was as a result.

Once she was gone, he couldn’t stand the yawning emptiness that stood in place of that ritual. 

Tony starts washing himself and his mind courses through a dozen different thoughts, always catching on a particular one. Leigh’s hair. Tony swears under his breath. Her hair had been in a braid all day, both times he’d gotten to kiss her. Tony’s goal-oriented when it comes to sex, dogged about it, and he has _goals_ when it comes to her hair. Multiple ones. At least one of them involves her being comfortable and trusting enough for him to get to take handfuls of it, _wrapped around his hands,_ even, while kissing her. Another (that he has hidden down deep, because it’s assuming a hell of a lot for such a new relationship that doesn’t even qualify as a relationship yet) involves being buried inside her, his head bent over her shoulder, face sunk in the golden strands.

These are the opposite of the kinds of thoughts he is supposed to be having, though. Tony cycles through projects in his lab, pausing on the bunker. He wonders whether he should ‘fix’ it, or whether Leigh was right about its insuitability. He can’t bring himself to regret the time they spent in there, though, despite how much more intense _everything_ had been, including the intrusive thoughts about the Snap and Thanos and his life Before. Kissing Leigh once they’d gotten out had been every bit the sensual experience he’d hoped it would be when he’d thought about it in the bunker.

“Get it together,” Tony tells himself. He’s hard now, a combination of his vivid sexual fantasy and the very real memory of her unexpectedly kissing him, touching him without prompting . Leigh’s constantly surprising; Tony’s spent a good portion of the day wired with an undercurrent of curiosity, wondering what small thing she’ll do to delight him. It’s, again, different from Pepper, who he had mostly figured out except for all the delicious ways he _absolutely had not,_ the intimate ways that she’d opened up to him once they were more to each other.

He leans back against the tile, slams his head a bit on it, trying to knock his thoughts back onto their axis. Tony suspects that the reason he keeps thinking about Pepper in the same mental breath as Leigh is that his heart is rearranging itself, and it’s not a clean process.

Touching himself right now would be the _worst_ idea. He’ll probably regret it, not just because of the ghosts of the past, but because there’s no way in hell he won’t be thinking about Leigh as he does it. Tony doesn’t subscribe to the taboo of those kinds of fantasies, but he’s aware of the way they can intrude on real life.

At this point he’s been dithering so long that his mind will file this memory into the same folder as jerking off anyway, so Tony gives in, lets his hand drift down to rub a stripe of anticipation on his thigh. It’s close but not anywhere near enough, just like when he’d been holding Leigh against him with no friction, less than twenty minutes ago. Tony’s poised to grip himself and thinks back to the moment when she stroked her tongue against his, taking his cock in hand at the very second he relives it. The pleasure reinforces the memory. Next, he allows himself to picture his hand riding up from her hip underneath the blouse to find that her bra is made of lace.

He swirls his thumb over the head of his cock right as he pictures thumbing her nipple for the first time through the fabric. In his mind’s eye, Leigh pulls away from their kiss as she sucks in a breath. He strips her blouse off in the fantasy, right there in the open area beside the elevator. Leigh buries her face in his chest and he tugs her into an alcove, he knows exactly which one. As he pumps himself with exactly the right pressure and grip, Tony pictures himself resting her up against the wall. He leans beside her, dragging down the lace with his teeth at the same time as his hand dips down past the waistband of her skirt and panties.

Tony’s panting, hand moving faster now. He turns to brace himself against the wall of the shower with his free hand, so the hot water pummels his back. In his fantasy, he breathes hot on her nipple, but lifts his head to see the look on her face when he slides his fingers between her folds to find that she’s wet for him.

The desire-soaked look he imagines on Leigh’s face as she feels him touch her so intimately for the first time sets Tony off, unexpectedly. He groans, hips jerking as he comes hard, chasing the pleasure. Tony selfishly holds onto the picture he’s created of her: mouth open, face flushed, eyes wide, pupils blown. He yearns to make it a reality.

 _“Fuck,”_ he shudders out, dipping his head down between both hands on the wall. 

Tony stands there for a good ten minutes before he turns off the water and gets out. He doesn’t regret a damned thing.

8888888888

By ten AM the next morning, Tony’s loading up the video of his PA stopping by Leigh’s apartment. He tells himself it’s not creepy, he just needs to know how she’s taking everything without him there to observe. It’s _scientific._

At the beginning of the video FRIDAY has compiled for Tony, his PA Chuck Fisher taps the Star Trek-esque annunciator on the panel outside Leigh’s apartment. Leigh comes to the door, and immediately Tony is gripped by a brief, irrational jealousy. Her hair is down. It’s clean, she’d taken a shower of her own, and the heavy ends of her honey-gold hair are curling thickly. Tony pictures fitting his fist between the curls, then lifting that hand to smell the spicy scent of whatever shampoo she uses.

“Hello, Miss Balci? I’m Charles Fisher, Mr. Stark’s personal assistant. I wanted to speak with you about some things you’ll want to know about the tower and your office, if you have the time?” Chuck’s wearing one of his more expensive suits, which Tony finds amusing. It’s navy blue, not black (which totally sets off the young man’s blue eyes, Tony has teased him about it before) and has a bit more of a sophisticated cut. It also looks like he had his hair cut recently. Tony chuckles. Chuck hasn’t had much work that involves other people lately, and his excitement kind of shows.

“Fisher, I recognize that. Thanks for stepping in, with the apartment stuff,” she says.

“Glad to,” Chuck tells her, his lips turning up into a bit of a surprised smile.

“Now’s fine, if you’d like to come in?” Leigh asks graciously. She steps back in the doorway and gestures for Chuck to precede her. Once inside, she pulls out a chair for him at the square breakfast nook table. “Would you like something to drink? It seems that someone, probably you, actually, has already stocked my fridge with some things. I’d hate for some of it to go to waste.”

Chuck looks a little dazed, which Tony appreciates. It seems like Leigh just has that effect on people. “You’re right. I’d take some apple juice?”

Her smile is warm. “Absolutely. It’s just through here. I can hear you, if you’d like to start.”

The two of them are both polite and genuine people, and it almost makes Tony’s teeth hurt to listen to Chuck go over the security protocols for the tower, the non public entrances and their codes, and the like. It goes on for fifteen minutes, the two of them polite-ing around each other, until finally, Chuck says something that prompts something interesting from Leigh.

“Oh, by the way, I’ve been informed by my boss that if you end up seeing the view from the top level without him, he’ll fire me.”

Leigh draws herself up indignantly in her seat across from him. “How much do you make a year, Mr. Fisher?” She’d been calling him Charles on and off for a while, so this has Tony leaning forward to examine the interaction.

“It’s a lot,” Chuck admits.

“I have quite an inheritance, you know,” Leigh tells him seriously.

“Please don’t waste it on me, Miss Balci,” Chuck says, aiming a crooked smile at her. Then, he changes the subject to the computer system that Leigh has access to because of living in the tower.

A few minutes later, Leigh catches Tony’s attention with a request.

“Some of my clients are private people, and my work isn’t always easily contained as just what happens in the office. Can we set up some kind of encryption for my internet usage, considering there’s an AI integrated throughout all of the systems in the tower?”

Tony can see Chuck considering this. “I think we can arrange that, yes. It might trigger a legal document to ensure we cover our bases from our end, if that’s not too uncomfortable for you.” Chuck’s pulling out all the stops. Tony’s seen Fisher be a hardass before, is fairly certain he was one just the day before with Leigh’s landlord, actually, but today, he’s a teddy bear.

“Whatever I need to sign I’d like Charriotte’s legal team to take a glance at, but yes, that’s fine,” Leigh says shrewdly.

“I can respect that, Miss Balci.”

Leigh frowns. “Do you think you could call me Leigh? Something about the formality feels forced, after everything you and Tony have done for me already.”

Tony winces at this assessment. He has ripped away her hopes of a burly carpenter soulmate, failed to save her family from the vagaries of probability during the Snap, and his very celebrity has caused her to lose her job _and_ her apartment. Depending on the parking laws in D.C., it’s possible he’s cost her up to $1,000 in towing fees, too. Tony makes a note to tell Chuck to check up on that.

On the screen, Leigh’s making a disappointed face, and Chuck is apologizing.

“--revisit that in a few weeks? I’m the ‘too soon’ meme right now, after hearing Mr. Stark speak about his architect more than once.”

Tony rests his elbow on the desk and covers his mouth with a few fingers, waiting for her reaction to _that._ Because of where the camera is, he has a full face view. Leigh looks down, almost shy for a few seconds, a tiny smile haunting her mouth.

She says, “Well, now I don’t want to know how that translates to not wanting to use my first name,” and Tony laughs and _laughs,_ because Chuck looks positively mortified. If she hadn’t spent less than 24 hours in his tower so far Tony would have wondered if she knew he was watching, and said that just to catch him by surprise.

8888888888

On the second day after they left the bunker, Chuck tells Tony that Leigh’s set up a standing order at a local grocery store.

8888888888

Early in the morning of the fourth day after they left the bunker, Tony sets up caution tape on the top floor and makes Chuck pick up actual ‘CAUTION: WORK AREA’ metal signage to prevent her from sneaking up there to take a look around. He’s certain he’ll hear something from her, email, text (Chuck had given her Tony’s number. The real one, the one no one gets to have), phone call, a visit, but by that evening, there’s been nothing.

Tony realizes that Leigh doesn’t mind waiting for something good. Something she’s been _promised._ Something she doesn’t have to work for.

8888888888

At 5:56 PM on the fifth day after they left the bunker, Tony has the pizza he’d told her about on that first day sent to her apartment, with a note he’d written taped to the top of the box.

He has FRIDAY bring up the live feed of the delivery, because Tony hasn’t seen her in days, and he’s any number of synonyms for ridiculous, even while he’s trying to respect her request for some time to herself.

Leigh answers the door still dressed for work. Her hair is up in its Austen-esque concoction, and she’s wearing an actual form-fitting miniskirt this time, in a rich gold color. It’s the shirt she’s wearing with it that’s fanciful, made entirely of white, soft-looking geometric lace that drapes over the gold camisole she’s wearing underneath it. The overall effect is that of a honeycomb, reminding Tony of the dreams he’d had before she’d spoken his Words.

He considers buying her a bee brooch and paying Chuck to sneak into her apartment to pin it on the shirt, once it’s back in her closet.

The pizza delivery girl is very young and very peppy. She hands over the pizza, declines Leigh’s offer to rustle up a tip, and heads off, leaving Leigh standing there, bemused. The tape with Tony’s note on it has twisted, leaving the note face down, so he gives himself permission to watch her take the box into her apartment, even though it’s probably a violation of her privacy. Tony tells himself it’s just this once, and sits forward in his desk chair to watch as Leigh sets the box down on the table.

She flips over the paper, leans in. Tony curses the position of the camera, as she’s faced away from it, but then she reaches out her hand and runs her fingers across his name. Seeing this is somehow painfully intimate, and Tony closes his eyes, even though he feels an odd sense of relief and an even deeper burgeoning joy.

“FRIDAY, cut the feed.”

_“If you say so, Boss.”_

Tony understands why FRIDAY finds his reaction illogical, but despite loving what he’s seen, he knows he shouldn’t have been in a position to see it in the first place.

“In fact, restrict my access to videos in her apartment, FRIDAY,” Tony says impulsively, pursing his lips against the resistance he feels somewhere deep inside him.

_“Restricted.”_

Tony leans back in his chair, fiddling with the Stark Industries pen he’d picked up to distract himself with. “Set a random password, one of the days of the week, rotating daily. One wrong guess locks out the feed for 24 hours,” he adds, knowing himself too well.

_“Done.”_

“Add a protocol that informs Miss Balci if I succeed in accessing the feed more than three times,” Tony says, rubbing his chest against the way his heart is protesting the latest addition. If he doesn’t screw things up, she won’t be staying at that particular apartment long enough for him to guess correctly that many times anyway.

_“Overkill complete, Boss.”_

“That’s enough out of you,” Tony says.

8888888888

On the eighth day since they got out of the bunker, at 12 AM, Tony installs a digital whiteboard outside Leigh’s apartment door. He’s checked the surveillance feeds every day and knows she goes to work at the lab, has gone out into the city once to get coffee in the morning (and the place she went to was _terrible,_ she would have known better if she would have remembered she actually _knows someone who lives in the tower_ and asked him about it), and has otherwise spent all of her time in her apartment.

The whiteboard is his concession to the fact that he shouldn’t hound her about why she’s been possibly avoiding him, even though he wants to hound her. So, he hasn’t allowed himself to send emails (they would be needy, selfish ones anyway, not a good look when persuading) or call (it’s honestly a concession to how much he likes her as a person that he hasn’t _required_ that she swap to a StarkPhone. He could get her one so tricked out she’d sleep with him out of sheer gratitude (he knows that’s not true but maybe pictured it happening, once).), but _this_ he can do.

The whiteboard is basically a huge touchscreen with an operating system that shows a half and half display, half blank message board space you can draw on with the stylus, half calendar set to a single-day list. You can be a heathen and write straight on the board wherever you like, or you can tap a few options like ‘sticky note’ or ‘appointment entry’ and take advantage of the graphics. So, because he’s not hounding her, Tony starts with a sticky note in red (it looks _great_ on the white surface, almost like it’s real, drop shadows and everything) saying **Tony says hi, BTW.**

8888888888

On the ninth day since they got out of the bunker, Chuck and Tony are in Tony’s SI office when Chuck gets a call. He smiles, nods, smiles some more, and then says ‘I’ll let him know.’

“That could not have been a client,” Tony says, looking away from the device he is about to yank apart, because he’s too lazy to grab the safety glasses.

“It wasn’t. It was Miss Balci asking me to tell you she says hello, and that your computer interface is a wonder of technology which is wasted on the wall outside her apartment.” Chuck’s expression tells Tony he knows that Tony won’t like hearing this, and that he’s looking forward to the fallout.

Chuck is a little shit sometimes, but Tony really likes him.

“It’s a _whiteboard,”_ Tony says, kind of stunned. ‘Hello’ is not a Leigh word. ‘Hello’ is a client word, a ‘distant politeness’ word. Leigh would say ‘hey’ or ‘hi’ or ‘oh my god, what are you _doing?’_ She wouldn’t say ‘Hello’ to Tony. “I listened to you answer that call. You didn’t correct her.”

“It seemed like the material point wasn’t what the device is, but that she isn’t interested in using it,” Chuck says.

Tony swings by to check it, after dark, because again, not hounding.

The whiteboard is unchanged from the night before. He taps to open the next day’s events, and adds ‘Thank Tony for whiteboard’ at 12:00 PM. Leigh’s smart, she should catch that this means she could stop by his office (Chuck told her where it was, Tony checked) and they could have lunch together.

8888888888

On the ninth day since they got out of the bunker, Chuck gets another call, at 3:00 PM. He walks over to the window of the factory office he and Tony are visiting, and Tony can’t hear anything. When Chuck comes back, though, it’s with a smile too broad to be anything but trouble.

“Leigh says thank you for the _whiteboard,_ but it’s a massive waste of good tech and money to leave it languishing outside her apartment unused.”

“The solution to that is to _use_ it,” Tony says, frustrated. She hadn’t called, emailed, texted, or dropped by at noon. “And, it’s ‘Leigh’ now?”

“She asked,” Chuck shrugs.

Tony hacks into the whiteboard that night, adding a recurring event to every day that month, ‘use whiteboard,’ as well as another sticky note, in metallic gold this time because he can, that has an arrow pointing to the note saying **Tony says hi, BTW.** Underneath the arrow, in an obnoxious medieval script, it says, **do unto others as you would have them do unto you.**

8888888888

On the tenth day since they got out of the bunker, Chuck gets a call right before the end of work, during which he is unnaturally smiley and polite.

“Give me the phone,” Tony tells him. 

Chuck shakes his head and covers the bottom of his StarkPhone as if covering the receiver of an old-style telephone, something Tony finds hilarious every time he does it. Tony’s devices come with microphones that are way more intuitive than that, but Chuck is old school. “Stay strong,” Chuck says to Tony in a stage whisper.

Tony is convinced it’s Leigh on the other end, and who knows what she’ll assume his PA means by such a statement. “Phone. Now.”

“I will, thanks,” Chuck says, and _hangs up._

“I’m going to put you on a Performance Plan,” Tony points to Chuck. “That was direct insubordination.”

“My contract actually states that I am to take actions to protect your reputation, both personal and professional,” Chuck retorts.

“And this is relevant because…”

“You’re hounding her.” Tony glares at his PA, mind rushing to fill out seven bullet points of refutation before they’re interrupted by Chuck coming over and sitting on the chair beside the desk Tony’s leaning on. “She sent over stuff about the lake house and said she’s been really busy with a new client who specifically asked for her. The whiteboard makes her uncomfortable, she says she’s worried that everyone who walks out of the elevator can look over, get curious, and read her business.”

Tony hadn’t thought of it that way at all. The tower was mostly empty in the summer, a function of the worldwide adjustment of population and the new uses he’d put to the subsequent lack of demand for the space. No one had any reason to be on that floor anyway-- it was the same floor the Avengers had lived on when it was still Avengers tower. He hasn’t let anyone live there or have business there since the Snap. Leigh wouldn’t have any way of knowing these things, though.

“I’ll come up with something,” Tony tells Chuck.

8888888888

On the eleventh day since they got out of the bunker, Tony doesn’t do anything with the whiteboard to foster a false sense of calm. He doesn’t even check it.

8888888888

On the twelfth day since they got out of the bunker, Tony heads over to Leigh’s floor when he knows she’s at work. FRIDAY won’t show him her itinerary, as per some of the ‘not hounding’ rules he’d set up, but she does let him know Leigh’s on a conference call.

He takes down the whiteboard, uses his master override to get into her apartment, and mounts it on the wall beside the door, inside. When he boots it back up to make sure it’s working properly, he at first thinks that she’s wiped it. On closer inspection, though, it turns out she deleted his messages, and put up one of her own.

**Your heart is in the right place, Tony, but this is too much. Sorry I’ve been so busy.**

He wonders if ‘too much’ isn’t only referring to the assumed price, but that’s just _bleak,_ because he hasn’t spoken to her or seen her at all in nearly two weeks, so if that is too much, he’s basically screwed.

Tony stands there in Leigh’s apartment and thinks, thinks some more, and finally sits down on the floor (so as not to disturb anything), sets up a different interface for the whiteboard, and then installs it, wiping everything from before. Her note is the only thing Leigh’s done, besides move and minimize his notes. He appreciates that, so he preserves them and leaves them on the new improved version.

The last thing he does is download one of the really high-res images of the house in Pennsylvania, from one of the articles focused on her the year before.

When Tony lets himself back out of Leigh’s apartment, she has a whiteboard-sized picture frame that can be tapped to reveal an itinerary synced with the Apple app she uses at work and personally (Tony nearly chewed off his own fingers to do it, but he senses that he has left a sore spot outside her apartment for nearly a week, and this is his penance). There’s a smaller section for notes, and Tony leaves one there with usage instructions, mostly on how to upload and display different pictures. He also leaves a message on a honeycomb patterned sticky note.

**I hope this is better. Hi, BTW. ~Tony**

8888888888

On the thirteenth day since they got out of the bunker, Chuck gets a phone call. His poker face is utter _shit._

“Yes, I’ve heard of them. We’ve actually been trying to-- Yes. Really? _Wow.”_

Tony snaps his fingers, holding his hand out for the phone. Chuck turns his back on him.

“That’s-- Yes, guaranteed. Yes. I’ll tell-- actually, are you sure you don’t want to tell him yourself? He’s right--” Chuck laughs. “Okay. Yeah, I get it. Bye, then.”

“I could give you a written warning. In your file,” Tony tells Chuck. “What did she say?”

“I think there’s actually a file FRIDAY keeps with all the bullshit complaints you have about me. I can’t remember the filename, though.” Tony raises his eyebrows, and Chuck holds up a hand. “Okay, okay. You’re not going to believe this, though.”

Tony presses his lips together skeptically, crosses his arms, and pops his hip. “Hit me.”

“You remember Demetre Eusebios?”

“Hephaistos Systems, yeah. Guy won’t give us the time of day, we could double their profits if he’d get off his ass,” Tony says.

“Turns out his sister hired Charriotte as the architect for their new house in the Hamptons, and Eusebios called the office to talk to them about their association with you.”

“Do not tell me I’ve lost Leigh her job, Chuck.” 

Tony’s searching Chuck’s face for the signs of trouble, but doesn’t see anything but excitement. Tony hasn’t spent much time caring about the Bible in his life, but he knows what a Pharisee is, and Demetre Eusebios is one. Guy is one of the most performatively pious people on the planet, and his sole reason for buying what Tony believes are inferior products from their competitors is because he doesn’t like Tony’s ‘lifestyle.’ Which is particularly stupid, because the things Eusebios doesn’t approve of are at least five years behind him. He’s been practically a monk in comparison, since the Snap.

“More like she got _you_ one,” Chuck tells him. “The guy _called her,_ and instead of telling him to fuck right off, she got us their contract. She wants you to know that ought to cover the cost of the whiteboard, and you’re welcome.”

“I’m gonna need a minute,” Tony says, falling into his chair. He doesn’t even see when Chuck leaves, he’s too busy trying to comprehend the depth of Leigh’s sheer _fucking_ audacity. He loves her. It’s not even like she took the time to plan it all out, either! She just saw the opportunity, took it, and rubbed it in his face with the confidence of a medieval ruler.

He wonders what she _said,_ wonders if it’s about the soulmark, wonders how it is that she doesn’t seem to miss him the same way he misses her.

  
  
  



	8. Chapter Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony looks down at her and offers her a metaphorical hand. “We could go steady.”
> 
> His unconventional phrasing draws a laugh from her like he hoped it would. “How ‘farmhouse in Pennsylvania’ of you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now we set them on fire, in the good way! My new favorite phrase is 'well you ASKED,' followed shortly after by 'Desire is this.'
> 
> Programming note: I have a retinal tear, which requires some gnarly outpatient surgery. I'm not sure how quickly I'll be up and running afterwards, so my breakneck pace will slow. Since I'm posting so fast because I mostly want to be able to reread the story online instead of in my word file, it shouldn't be a big deal, haha.
> 
> To think I said I'd post slower. PSSHH.

### Chapter Eight

On the night of the fourteenth day since they got out of the bunker, Tony goes and knocks on Leigh’s door. He’d been meeting with a client, someone who really loves Iron Man, so Tony’s wearing suit pants, a wife-beater with the ARC reactor affixed to it, and a dress shirt. He didn’t dress up specifically for her, but it feels appropriate for what he’s planning to tell her, tonight.

It’s Sunday night. Leigh opens the door wearing a white sleeveless dress with yards of lacy fabric in the skirt. Her necklace is a double loop of blood red cherries, and most of it is caught in her low neckline. Tony’s never seen her wearing a bold color, much less something red. The surprise of seeing it makes him stammer a little bit in greeting.

“Hi, hey. I decided to give up and come by, see how you’re doing.”

“Hi, Tony,” Leigh says. He’d already forgotten how rich and warm her voice sounds. The recording of her and Chuck didn’t do it justice, not that he’s watched it more than twice or anything. She turns around to lead him into the apartment, and Tony sees that she has a red poppy clip holding half of her hair back. The rest of it hangs down loose, curling in those large twists he loves so much.

Once they’re through the doorway, Tony turns to see if the picture frame/whiteboard is still there. It is, displaying an image of Niagara Falls. Leigh sees him looking.

“The farmhouse picture was a nice surprise, but too hard to look at every day, it turned out,” Leigh says a little sadly. “I’m sorry abou--”

“Aht!” Tony cuts her off with a harsh noise that has Leigh blinking at him in surprise. “No stealing apologies. You didn’t do anything wrong.” It’s far more harsh than he wanted to be about this, but Tony’s been worried that Leigh has a deeply hidden inferiority complex. “I maybe got a little carried away,” he concedes. It’s the apology he accused her of stealing, the best he can bring himself to do.

Leigh looks at him for a long minute and nods. “I understand. Here’s hoping you didn’t take it out on Chuck.”

“He can take it,” Tony says, following her further into the apartment.

Leigh’s living room is homey, but very comfortable. He sits on the couch, and Leigh sits at the other end of it, turning to face him, her legs curled up underneath her.

“Worked on anything interesting since I’ve seen you?” she asks, and it’s surreal, the way she can gloss over the knowledge that he was hoping to talk to her for _weeks_ and didn’t get to. Tony knows how to bide his time, though. He doesn’t _like_ it, but he can do it.

He answers, relaxing into an explanation of the new metal alloy design he’s been trying to develop in his lab. It has heightened conductivity, but with the ability to hold the electrical current or magical power in a loop in its secondary surface. The denizens of Kamar Taj and their new Sorcerer Supreme had come to him looking for help to create doors, cabinets, and armor that could absorb the energy channeled into it, rather than being destroyed. 

Tony had told them he’d give it some thought, but once he got deep into the weeds of the project, he’d found there are practical applications with electricity, too. His design lays a warren of conductive wires underneath the primary surface of the metal, allowing them to capture the energy that might otherwise destroy it. The combination of metals includes Vibranium, and is inspired in some ways by the technology of King T’Challa’s suit. Tony’s design includes the ability to switch this absorption on and off with some intricate wiring and code. It’s that wiring that Tony’s been working on for the past week, he tells Leigh.

By the time Tony’s done excitedly gesturing and telling her about this stuff, using his phone to show her some of the schematics, an hour has passed. She seems to realize that at the same time, sliding to her feet, straightening her skirt where it has crinkled a bit from sitting on it so long.

“I’m sure you’re thirsty after I made you recap your passion project like that, can I get you anything?” she says, crossing the room toward the kitchen.

The way she phrases it makes Tony smile. Leigh has an odd combination of confidence and hesitancy that keeps him off-balance. He loves it. It’s ironic, considering how many women around him had tailored their looks, behavior, and conversation toward giving him exactly what they thought he wanted, over the years.

He must have taken too long to respond, because Leigh steps closer to the couch. “Wait. You aren’t going to ask for apple juice, are you? Because if that’s why your Mr. Fisher stocked that in my fridge I’m going to be a little embarrassed to have drunk it all already.”

Tony leans toward her with a hand on the couch arm. “Can I be there when you suggest that to him?”

“That’s a no, then. Water? Milk? My mother always told me milk would make me strong, so maybe you don’t need any more of that,” she says, eyeing him speculatively. It’s an artful compliment, but what pushes it into sexy is her body language, the way she traces her gaze over his arms before letting out a little breath and turning back to head into the kitchen.

“Water is fine,” Tony tells her. When she brings it out, he takes the glass, chugs a huge sip, and sets it down so firmly that it sloshes, his mind focused on what he’s planning to say. Leigh is walking past the table to get to her seat on the couch, and she just takes the hem of her dress and soaks up the couple of drops.

The mixture of pragmatism, unpredictability, and whimsy seems intrinsically _Leigh._

“I miss you,” Tony blurts out, all semblance of his organized argument about how it’s ridiculous to spend so much time apart when they live in the same building collapsing under pure sentiment.

Leigh stands across the coffee table from him, the damp handful of her dress still caught in her hand, staring. Hers is an attractive surprise; she looks pleased, rather than shocked.

“I got used to your face, as they say,” Tony says, spreading out his hands helplessly. This is in no way as eloquent as the things he’d planned to say, but he has an abhorrence of cue cards. “All jokes aside, I didn’t want to push you at first, but it’s been two weeks, and I’m weak. I miss you.”

Leigh’s brown eyes are wide, and her cheeks are flushed now. She looks down at the dress in her hand, then over at the couch, and just… sits, right there on the carpet across from him. It’s actually more like a kneel, but it’s very, very good for his ego. It’s as if Leigh can’t figure out how to walk anymore, under the burden of his good opinion.

She meets his gaze, bites her lip, and says, “I-- me too, not that I have any right to--”

“Stop. Look at your wrist,” Tony orders. Her cheeks pink further.

“I’m just saying, I walked onto your plane, and it’s just… _lavish,_ and then that car-- Tony, I looked it up, they only made like a thousand of them!” she says breathlessly, as if she really and truly is trying to explain, with characteristic sincerity, why she’s not worthy of his attention.

“Wrist,” he says, implacably.

Leigh leans on the coffee table, her cherry necklace clattering on the glass, the white dress cupping her body in an almost indecent way from his vantage point. “You are too rich to be believed, is what I’m saying. It’s intimidating.”

Tony leans over too, his gaze skittering over her breasts in search of her right arm, which he pulls across the table with a firm but gentle grip. He turns it over with no resistance from her, sees his name, and before he even thinks about what he’s doing, Tony slides down off of the couch onto his own knees. Then, now that he can reach, he lifts her wrist to his lips and kisses his name on her skin.

He holds still because he can feel the way her pulse is _jumping_ under him. When Tony finally lifts his head, he looks at her. Leigh’s got her eyes closed, the fingers of her other hand pressed to her mouth, and she’s breathing like she’s just run a marathon.

“Don’t be intimidated,” Tony says, swiping his thumb in the center of her palm before setting her hand back down.

 _“Now_ he says it,” she says, her voice breathy and low.

If Tony had a time machine, he’d consider using it to skip forward to steal a night with her after they’ve worked out all of the things that stand between now and happily ever after. The Tony of the future might not even mind that much-- he’d know what this Tony was missing out on, after all.

“You still didn’t look at it,” Tony says, knowing he sounds insufferable.

Leigh recovers just enough to snark at him. “Shouldn’t have gone and covered it up, then.”

 _“Excuse you,”_ Tony says, outraged. “It was romantic!”

“I agree with you,” Leigh says. “But, the following _must_ be said: Only Tony Stark would think kissing his name on someone else’s body is romantic!”

She’s completely right, and he doesn’t know what he loves more about it-- the fact that she feels comfortable calling it out, or that after being obviously affected by the moment itself, she can call it out at all.

“Look at your wrist, Felicia,” Tony tells her sternly.

She looks down and lightly strokes across his name with two fingers. To Tony, it feels like she’s touching _him._ Leigh’s eyelashes are a smudge of golden brown against the red of her cheeks, and she’s propped up on the coffee table like she’s presenting herself to him. He needs to get up, but he’s not sure how to do it without advertising exactly how turned on by the entire situation he is.

“It’s like we went from Earth to hyperspace, and back again, all that time together, and now… Is there a middle ground between the basement and hyperspace?” Tony asks her. He shouldn’t, but he can’t help but stare at her chest. Leigh notices, looks down, tries to tug her dress up, and when that fails, she gets up. Instead of sitting up on the couch, though, she sits on the floor a few feet away from him, resting her arm on the seat of the couch.

“Define the basement?” Leigh asks him, settling her voluminous skirt around her legs in her new position.

Tony pushes the coffee table farther into the middle of the room to give himself more space. He folds one knee up and puts his hand in his lap to hide his arousal, instead of symbolically sullying one of her delicately knitted pastel pillows.

“No interaction for two weeks. You might as well still live in D.C.” Tony tells her, pressing his lips together in disapproval.

“So, what would the kitchen be?”

Tony likes her expansion of his analogy. He leans his head back to think. “Coffee. There are a few good places within walking distance. I’m sure there are some decent donut or bagel shops,” he says. The latter is an understatement of course, it’s _New York City._

“I could do that,” Leigh tells him. “What about the dining room?”

“I know some very nice restaurants,” Tony says immediately. He looks over at Leigh, who looks uncertain again, so he adds, “Some of them don’t even have a dress code.” It’s a joke about expense, and he hopes she doesn’t take it badly.

“I would be willing to try one,” she says, narrowing her eyes at him for a second. “Living room?”

“I have a large television, a large collection of good movies, and a large couch we won’t need most of.”

“I’d like that,” she says. Her voice is warm and inviting. Tony wants her to fall asleep on his shoulder so he can wake her up with the kind of kisses that would never be shown on a movie screen for fear of raising the rating.

He watches her face as she realizes what the next logical room to list would be. The blush is back. Leigh lifts a hand to her chin, rubbing her thumb on her lower lip thoughtfully. He’d seen her do this a few times in the bunker, and it had never failed to give him Ideas. Tony thinks that if he had any of his energy-absorbing metal in the room with them right now, it would be collecting the heat between them, the longer she avoids saying the word ‘bedroom.’

“Hallway?” she punts. 

Tony lets some of his unresolved tension show on his face. “Leigh,” he says.

“It’s open-plan up until the hallway,” she tells him smugly. “You want to take on the architect over this?”

“Among other things,” Tony replies. “All right, hallway: I’d show you the suits. You’re a fan of good design, and if you’re up for it, there’s a way to try on just the boots and levitate around three feet up. It’s totally safe.”

“If you have to _say_ it’s totally safe, that makes me question whether it’s totally safe,” Leigh points out. “I’ll have to take that one under advisement.”

“Whose advice?”

“Not Colonel Rhodes, because he has a suit, right? Iron Patriot?” she asks. Tony nods. “Charles, then. He seems like he’s practical enough to tell me the truth.”

“No making Chuck pick between us, he’ll pick you after what? Less than an hour total, talking to you?” he says. Leigh looks smug, but Tony says, “Next?”

Leigh makes eye contact with him and simply holds his gaze for a long moment, her lovely brown eyes speculative. Only then does she say it, her voice low and quiet. “Bedroom?”

Her earlier hesitation makes _this_ bravery hot.

“That’s up to you,” Tony tells her, because it is. If it were up to him, that’s where they would be right now, but he’s been forced to be patient because he’s mostly in love with her.

She takes in a breath, looks down, and then says, “I’m actually pretty interested in what your answer to this one would be.”

Tony’s chuckle rumbles deep. “Might be faster to list the things I _don’t_ want to do.”

Her startled gaze flies back up to his. Doubt crosses her face, confusing him until she explains, “That’s a billionaire’s answer, isn’t it? When given a choice, the answer isn’t to pick between them, it’s to say ‘yes.’”

“I won’t pretend I’m not greedy, Leigh,” Tony says, moving closer to her, close enough to reach out and run the back of his fingers across the shiny coils of hair on the couch beside her. “But that’s a function of desire, not wealth.”

“Oh,” she says. Tony sees a wave of something cross her face. Her eyes narrow very slightly and her tongue comes out to wet her lips. Leigh bites her bottom lip next, but it’s not anxiety; if he were forced to put a name to what he was seeing, Tony thinks he would call it recklessness. “Define desire,” she finally says.

Tony really likes when she challenges him. He opens his mouth to answer her, not even sure what he’ll say, but she interrupts him.

“Actually, I think maybe I’d rather you show me.” Her voice is low and resonant at a frequency connected straight to his groin.

“Twist my arm,” Tony murmurs. His blood has thickened to napalm, he thinks, and the first touch of her skin will set him alight. Leigh’s hair is puddled around where she sits against the couch. He lets his hand fall into the nest of curls as he scoots closer to her. Leigh’s chest is rising and falling rapidly, but her brown eyes are steadily watching him as he moves toward her. Tony shakes his head in wonder, his pleased smile sparking up without any prompting. She’s beautiful in her anticipation of what he’s going to do.

“Desire is this,” Tony says. Swiftly, he slides his right hand around her waist, pulling her onto his lap, right there on the floor, against the couch. He has to tug her skirts up not to trap her legs, and just as he’d planned, he’s able to twine her hair around his left hand as he guides her into position. Then, he uses that hand and his grip on her hair to angle her head, just this side of rough, as he takes her mouth. Tony’s held back twice, but he doesn’t, now.

He sweeps his tongue past her lips, chasing the sweetness she’d teased him with before. Tony’s right hand is heavy on Leigh’s hip, and he thrusts up, blatantly grinding against her. She _moans,_ catching her breath right after in a sound halfway to obscene for the effect it has on him. Suddenly her hands are on him, one against his cheek, the other braced on his arm, gripping with her fingernails skating over the shirt fabric. Leigh moves her hips against him, and Tony lets go of her and scrabbles at her skirt, finding her leg and gliding his palm up to her knee, intoxicated by the feeling of her bare skin.

Tony’s desperate for another one of those moans of hers. He starts to rock his hips, letting go of her leg to band his arm around her waist again. Tony wants to hold her still so she feels exactly how hard he is, hoping for a gasp or a groan. At the same time, he thrusts his tongue in the same rhythm, essentially fucking her mouth, drunk on the spicy smell of her hair. Initially, she tries to move with him, but Tony’s too strong, and her hands flutter at his shoulders when she seems to realize he’s completely in control. That’s when Leigh fights back by melting into him, submitting totally, releasing all the tension in her body.

He hadn’t expected that at all, and Tony groans at the feeling of power it gives him, both hands sliding up to tangle in her hair. That’s when she finally rewards him with another sound, a whimper on the end of a sigh.

Tony breaks the kiss to look at her. Leigh’s eyes are dark with approval, lips swollen and red. She says, “My god,” and drops her head onto his shoulder.

“Well, you _asked,”_ Tony says, his husky tone back in full force. 

“Full marks for being thorough,” Leigh says, her voice muffled against his shoulder. She lifts her head and kisses his cheek, her body tensing as she is obviously about to get up. Tony, who has always been an opportunist, braces his hand against the back of her head to stop her, and steals a kiss. It’s slight, inconsequential, and somehow devastating; representative of the possibility that Tony might be allowed to touch her without objection or explicit permission, if she’s near enough.

He helps her up, and she reaches out her hand to him too, even though it’s got to be obvious that Tony Stark _\--Iron Man--_ wouldn’t need her help. That seems like the essence of Leigh, though: the benefit of the doubt, always freely given. A lowered gun, despite doing so the very moment she finds out her hoped-for soulmate is the man who didn’t save her family. Card games and discussion instead of an insistence that he _release her,_ as an autonomous grown woman with her own agency.

Her current hangup, his wealth, seems like more of a difficult compromise for her than anything else so far. It’s as if the harder something is, the easier it might be for her to accept, like she’s been raised with as broad a streak of responsibility as Steve _Fucking_ Rogers was. 

“It seems like we were in hyperspace again, for a little bit there,” Leigh says. Tony takes in a breath to say something, and she adds, quickly, “Do _not_ call yourself an astronaut.”

“I’ve been in space, I earned it,” he protests.

“It’s possible to stretch a metaphor too far, though look who I am saying that to,” Leigh laughs. She lets out a breath and looks up at Tony, the faintest outline of vulnerability edging her features. “So what now?”

Tony looks down at her and offers her a metaphorical hand. “We could go steady.”

His unconventional phrasing draws a laugh from her like he hoped it would. “How ‘farmhouse in Pennsylvania’ of you.”

“It’s probably as domestic as I get, Dorothy, but you should know that no amount of heel clicking will get you out of the publicity of this,” Tony said, reaching down to press his thumb against the ‘Tony’ on her wrist. “--whether or not the press has confirmation it’s actually there. Hide out in your apartment if you have to, but remember you have an ally in the penthouse.”

He is trying to sound encouraging, with a large side portion of hardass, but what Tony sounds like to his own ears is _hurt,_ and Leigh spots that, easily. She catches his elbows in her hands, her warm brown eyes concerned.

“I hurt you.” It’s a statement, a disbelieving one at that.

The thing is, she did. He still doesn’t quite understand why, no matter how responsive she is to his kisses. It can’t be as simple as being freaked out by his money, no matter what she says. Tony shakes off the ugly feeling of the lie and tells it anyway. “Not at all. Just not used to such an abrupt shift, that’s all.”

The mild rebuke hits, she releases him, and Tony feels shitty about it. Not shitty enough to take it back, though, and really, it’s true, isn’t it? She kissed him, then pretended he didn’t exist and made nice with his PA as if he wouldn’t notice.

Tony’s rationalizing himself into being upset where before he was just hurt, like she’d said. It’s not a good feeling, so he deflects.

“Hey, Rhodey was asking about dinner the other day, you interested? He suggested tomorrow or the next day.”

“I would love that,” Leigh says with a big smile.

8888888888

That night, Tony thinks over what happened in Leigh’s apartment and kind of wants to punch himself. He’s got a penchant for self-sabotage, and apparently ramping himself up right after the woman he wants agrees to go out with him is just the latest in a long line.

It’s more fun to think about that bow-string pull of tension between them when he was waiting for her to say ‘bedroom.’ He kind of wants to pull up a dictionary of architecture words and make a list of rooms so he can spring them on her and see what she comes up with.

‘Bathroom’ is easy: Tony wants to get one of those huge antique tubs, the kind with metal claw feet. He wants the thing to be big enough for Leigh, her hair, and him, and he wants to wash her hair and drape it over her body like a fucking mermaid. Maybe take pictures, he doesn’t even know (only if she’s okay with that, of course).

It’s late, and Tony feels like he fucked up by lying about being hurt, and he’s not going to change his mind about the lying, so it’s sitting in him like an embedded thorn.

He papers over the feeling by ordering the tub and scheduling a reno on the bathroom in the master suite of the penthouse.

Presumptuous? You fucking betcha.

8888888888

It turns out that their dinner with Rhodey has to be at the penthouse, because Tony has a video call with someone in Tokyo at 10 AM JST, 8 PM EST. It’s fine, he’ll duck out for a half hour, let Leigh and Rhodey start their plans of Stark Domination, and come back in time to dismantle whatever they’re planning.

He tells both of them to dress up a little, and shows up at Leigh’s door to escort her to his place. He’s wearing a deep blue shirt under a charcoal suit. Tony’d tried to buy a few gold shirts in Leigh’s honor but Chuck had nixed them as looking bad with his coloring.

Tony rolls his eyes just remembering that whole conversation, but he trusts Chuck’s dress sense, so.

Leigh comes to the door still fastening her second feathery dangle earring, and all the stress from the past two weeks just leaves Tony’s body on seeing her. Her dress is bottle-green and hits below her knees, and the top seems to be two large swathes of fabric just casually draped to cover her, so loose that one shoulder is exposed. There’s a wide, sloppy bow at her waist and Tony has the impression that if he untied it, the whole dress would collapse into a puddle at her feet. Leigh tells him she’ll be right back, she forgot her shoes. When she turns, he sees that she probably spent an hour on her hair alone.

Tony remembers one evening in the tower, before Ultron and the way the team split into factions, when Natasha had a mission that required her to go undercover to observe someone at a carnival. She’d decided to go completely opposite her usual route, probably because Clint had dared her or she’d lost a bet or something. She was dressed up as Elsa from Frozen, seated at the table wearing the blue dress braiding the ice blond wig into the character’s characteristic look. It had taken forever, and Tony treasured the memory, because she and Clint had bickered, with profanity, for nearly the whole time. Leigh’s hair is a warmer blonde, and she didn’t braid all of it, just a kind of half crown around the back, but it had probably taken forever. It’s flattering, she looks beautiful.

He wants to mess it up in all the best ways.

He’s lost in his memories of Clint and Natasha on that day as he walks Leigh into the elevator, and it’s only when the doors open again that Tony realizes that he _likes_ the memory, that it hasn’t ripped him up the way thinking about them usually does. It’s as if his brain has finally, _finally_ allowed that disconnect between the _LOSS_ and the roots those people had left planted in his heart. Tony’s been in that place about Pepper for about five months.

For the first time, Tony asks himself if it might not be worth spending a little bit of time trying to not hate the very thought of these people he loves and misses so much. He’s standing there in the elevator having this revelation, when something else hits him.

He hasn’t said anything to Leigh. Not about how she looks, not about how her shoes are somehow _very_ sexy despite having no heel, not about how much he wants to know if she thought about him while she took so long to do her hair. She’d stopped a few steps out of the elevator to look around (hopefully not having a crisis about the expense of it all), and he rushes after her.

“You look really great,” Tony says stupidly. She looks hot. She looks gorgeous. ‘Great’ is a kindergarten descriptor for what Leigh looks like tonight.

“Thank you,” Leigh says. “You look like every woman’s dream date combined with, how do I even put it?” she asks, a wicked little smile on her lips. “Just enough edge of danger. I think it’s the goatee. You look like you are _not_ to be trusted.”

Tony spends so much time internally preening that Leigh makes it down the first step into the open-plan living room. He jogs up and sneaks a hand onto her stomach to pull her against him backwards. “You’re right, I’m a rogue. Close your eyes anyway?” Leigh startles initially, but relaxes against him.

“Is this ‘I forgot to clean up my penthouse’ related or view related?”

“It’s cute that you think I’d do any cleaning myself,” Tony tells her. “View related. Rhodey’s due any moment, just walk with me about ten steps?” He takes her hand and walks her forward, checking to make sure her eyes are still closed. When he gets a foot away from the picture window, he indulges in a kiss under her ear, and says, “Open your eyes.”

“Okay, wow,” Leigh says. The city’s laid out in front of them; the way the windows don’t end at the corner makes it feel like they’ve got an unlimited view.

“Yeah, that does not get old,” Rhodey says from behind them. Tony’s still got his hand around Leigh’s right wrist, and he realizes as he turns to greet Rhodey that she’s not wearing the cloth patch to cover his name. She’s got a delicate wire bracelet scattered with emerald-colored beads ringing her wrist instead, mostly covering the soulmark.

“Hey, Rhodey,” Tony says. His friend’s dressed up too, wearing his black suit with a casual sense of cool that Tony envies. Tony’s sense of cool is both monetary and a factor of cumulative articles about his attitude, but Rhodey just _is._

They head over to the dining room and sit down. The meal is set up at serving tables in stages, and it’s delicious.

“This your cook or did you get it from a restaurant, Tony?” Rhodey asks.

Tony shoots a look over at Leigh, but she doesn’t comment about him having a chef. “Restaurant, this time. I have to bring it here, Leigh doesn’t go out, apparently,” he teases.

“Not true,” she says, setting down her glass of water. “I went out today, even.”

“Please tell me it was not to that terrible bagel shop?”

“Nope,” Leigh tells him, her lips curving up into a shy smile. “I changed my residency today. Also registered my gun legally, so we can get it out of the safe I don’t have the combination to.”

“Residency?” Rhodey asks, not up to speed. Tony’s stalled out, because the implications are pretty powerful.

“I used to live in D.C.,” Leigh tells him. 

Tony gulps his water. ‘Used to.’ Three weeks ago this woman sitting in his tower, in his dining room, in his _heart,_ lived in another state, and had never spoken a word to him. The tectonic shift that occurred when the two of them collided not once, but twice (and on the same _exact patch of land,_ he realizes) is enough to move mountains.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dress
> 
> https://www.asos.com/us/asos-design/asos-design-fallen-shoulder-midi-prom-dress-with-tie-detail-in-bottle-green/prd/11354712?colourwayid=16331467&SearchQuery=asos%20design%20falen%20shoulder%20midi%20prom%20dress
> 
> Bracelet
> 
> https://www.etsy.com/listing/192990920/61-green-bracelet-emerald-jewelry?ref=shop_home_active_9&frs=1


End file.
